IEEE Awards Booklet - 2023 - 17

2023 IEEE MEDALS
IEEE Founders Medal
Sponsored by the IEEE Richard and Mary Jo
Stanley Memorial Fund of the Foundation
IEEE Medal in Power Engineering
Sponsored by the IEEE Industry Applications,
Industrial Electronics, Power Electronics, and
Power & Energy Societies
Rodney Allen Brooks
Kamal Al-Haddad
For leadership in research and commercialization
of autonomous robotics,
including mobile, humanoid, service,
and manufacturing robots
Rodney Allen Brooks is a robotics visionary. Early on, he saw
the future of robotics, then found ways to create that future and
bring robots to everyday life. The impact of his work is found
everywhere, from the research lab to the consumer market,
from the living room to the planet Mars. Brooks realized in the
1980s that robots were large, slow, expensive, and unreliable. A
large part of the problem was robot control. Traditional control
architecture was centered on the sense, think, act loop. A typical
robot used sensors to make a model of the world, reasoned about
the model, then took action. It wasn't uncommon for a robot to
spend 5 minutes deciding how to move 5 centimeters. So Brooks
developed a solution: subsumption architecture, a groundbreaking
behavior-based system that enabled mobile robotics. In addition
to his distinguished research career, Brooks is also an entrepreneur,
founder of three trail-blazing companies: Rethink Robotics,
Robust AI, and iRobot (the first successful service robotics
company). One early iRobot product, Grendel, led directly to
NASA's Sojourner Mars rover. iRobot's groundbreaking PackBot
reconnaissance and disposal robot changed how bomb disposal is
conducted. It was the most widely adopted man-portable robot
deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, saving thousands of lives. It
even helped with the immediate aftermath of the tsunami at the
nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan in 2011. On the domestic front,
iRobot's Roomba is the top-selling vacuum cleaner in the U.S.
and has forever changed how people think about robots. Recently,
Brooks has focused on building robots for manufacturing. His
Baxter and Sawyer industrial robots are safe, can learn by humans
showing them how to do tasks, and can cope with variations on
the assembly line unlike any other industrial robot. Technology
has undergone a dramatic transformation in the past 20 years. The
leading edge of this transformation has been in artificial intelligence
and robotics, fueled by the introduction of mobile robotics
and advances in machine learning. Brooks has been a visionary,
pioneer, and leader in this space.
An IEEE Life Fellow, Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of
Robotics (emeritus), Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Scope: For outstanding contributions in the leadership, planning,
and administration of affairs of great value to the electrical and
electronics engineering profession.
For contributions to power electronics
converters for power quality and
industrial applications
Kamal Al-Haddad has made pioneering contributions to the field
of power electronics and has greatly advanced the technology
through applications in a wide range of areas, including traction,
power quality, lighting, induction heating, and telecommunications.
He has consistently delivered high quality, reliability, and costeffectiveness
in the creation of commercially viable power solutions
for the benefit of everyday society. His work on resonant power
converters is used in the design of high-efficiency, high-density
power supplies for telecommunications applications at Emerson,
Canada. His work on the improvement of power quality was
adopted by the Quebec Ministry of Transportation in the construction
of a suburban electric-traction system for metropolitan
Montreal. The North American Traction Division of Bombardier
applied his techniques to its design of a 250-kW power converter
for the monorail-traction system that now serves Jacksonville,
Florida, USA. Al-Haddad's advances in remedial strategy for electrical
circuits have been applied to fly-by-wire aircraft engines. His
power electronics components and structure-modeling techniques
have been used in commercial software packages, in conjunction
with MATLAB-Simulink in more than 1,700 universities, and
thousands of industries worldwide. Especially significant have
been Al-Haddad's contributions to power quality and harmonic
mitigation of power-distribution systems. His novel methodologies
solved major industrial problems generated by harmonic
propagation, and he designed and implemented the first active
rectifier with active filtering capability and voltage harmonics
correction. His innovations have had broad applications in power
supplies for photovoltaic energy conversion systems, industrial
lasers, discharge lamps, induction heating, and manufacturing.
Al-Haddad's work has spurred extensive new research by others,
which has contributed to the rapid development of power
quality, electrification for transportation, renewable energy, and
distributed generation for society.
An IEEE Life Fellow, Al-Haddad is a professor and the senior
Canada research chair, École de Technologie Superieure, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada.
Scope: For outstanding contributions to the technology associated
with the generation, transmission, distribution, application, and
utilization of electric power for the betterment of society.
17 | 2023 IEEE AWARDS BOOKLET
IEEE Awards Booklet - 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2023
