Rifat Sipahi

Professor and Associate Chair for Research Affairs,  Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Program Director,  Master of Science in Robotics
Faculty Advisor,  Master of Science in Mechatronics concentration

Contact

Social Media

Office

  • 334J SN
  • 617.373.6011

Lab

  • 334 Egan

Research Focus

Control systems and mechatronics; stability analysis and control synthesis of dynamical systems with delays; interplay between stability, delays, and graphs; control-systems-aided human-machine systems; engineering education research; disability research; systems biology

About

Sipahi received his BS from Technical University of Istanbul in 2000, and MS and PhD degrees respectively in 2002 and 2005 from University of Connecticut, all in mechanical engineering. Awarded with a Chateuabriand scholarship by the French government, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Universite de Technologie de Compiegne, HeuDiaSyC Labs (CNRS) in France. He joined the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University in August 2006 where he is currently a Professor and Associate Chair for Research Affairs.

Sipahi is the recipient of the 2015 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division Outstanding Young Investigator Award, a 2011 DARPA Young Faculty Award, 2022 College of Engineering Outstanding Faculty Service Award, 2014 College of Engineering Faculty Fellow Award, and 2011 College of Engineering Martin W. Essigmann Outstanding Teaching Award. He has also been actively involved in ASME Dynamic Systems and Control (DSC) Division, taking editorial duties in division newsletter and recently in division-led ASME DSC Magazine. His scholarly activities include publication of 70 journal articles and 95 peer-reviewed conference papers, as well as 10 book chapters and additional 33 conference presentations including invited session talks. His research has been funded primarily by US National Science Foundation and DARPA. He (co-)edited four book volumes with Springer, each with a collection of invited chapters totaling around 400 pages (2009, 2012, 2014, 2019), total of which received over 150,000 chapter downloads to date according to Springer. His Google Scholar h index is 33.

Sipahi has been actively involved as associate editor, associate editor at large, publicity chair, finance chair, exhibits/sponsors chair, outreach chair, program committee member, session chair/co-chair in many conferences organized by ASME, IEEE, and IFAC, including Editor of the Conference Editorial Board of the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference (2018-2019), co-chair of 2022 IFAC Workshop on Time Delay Systems, and the 2012 IFAC Workshop on Time Delay Systems, which he co-organized at Northeastern University, and of which he was the Program Editor. He is also the co-creator of e-delay newsletter together with Prof. Niculescu. He was the lead organizer of three one-full-day educational workshops with Professors Hitay Ozbay, Silviu-Iulian Niculescu, Wim Michiels, Dimitri Breda, and Fatihcan M. Atay in the field of Time Delay Systems at three major control systems conferences (2013, 2014 European Control Conference, and 2013 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control) as well as the sole organizer of a similar workshop held preceding the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference in 2015. He is the lead author of the article entitled Stability and Stabilization of Systems with Time Delay, Limitations and Opportunities that was published in 2011 in IEEE Control Systems Magazine, with S.-I. Niculescu, C.T. Abdallah, W. Michiels and K. Gu as co-authors; the author of the book entitled Mastering Frequency Domain Techniques for the Stability Analysis of LTI Time Delay Systems (2019, Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics); and co-author in an article in Nature Human Behaviour (2019).

Sipahi is a Fellow of ASME since 2014 and was elevated to IEEE Senior member grade in 2016. He currently serves as Associate Editor for Automatica.

Education

  • PhD (2005), Mechanical Engineering,
    University of Connecticut
  • MSc (2002), Mechanical Engineering,
    University of Connecticut
  • BSc (2000), Mechanical Engineering,
    Istanbul Technical University

Honors & Awards

  • 2022 Outstanding Faculty Service Award
  • 2017 Associate Editor, Automatica
  • 2016 IEEE Senior Member
  • 2015 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division Young Investigator Award
  • 2014 COE Faculty Fellow
  • 2014 ASME Fellow
  • 2011 DARPA Young Faculty Award.
  • 2011 Martin W. Essigmann Outstanding Teaching Award of the College of Engineering, Northeastern University.
  • 2011 Nominated for the Excellence for Teaching Award of Northeastern University.
  • Lead author of the review article published and featured as cover in IEEE Control Systems Magazine February 2011 issue.
  • 2005 Chateaubriand Scholarship to conduct post-doctoral research in France, awarded by the French Government.
  • 2003 Best Master’s Thesis Award of School of Engineering, University of Connecticut.
  • 2002 Best Student Paper Award from Dynamic Systems and Control Division at ASME-IMECE Conference, New Orleans, LA.

Teaching Interests

  • ME 3460 Robot Dynamics and Control
  • ME 4550 Mechanical Engineering Design
  • ME 4555 System Analysis and Control
  • ME 5659 Control Systems Engineering
  • ME 5245 Mechatronics
  • Time Delay Systems, Stability and Control (graduate level)
  • HONR 3310 Introduction to System Dynamics (Honors Program)
  • MEIE 4701, 4702: ME Capstone (senior design)

Leadership Positions

01/19 – 6/22. Associate Chair for Undergraduate Affairs, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston

07/22 – current. Associate Chair for Research Affairs, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston

Professional Affiliations

  • American Society of Mechanical Engineers International
  • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Research Overview

Control systems and mechatronics; stability analysis and control synthesis of dynamical systems with delays; interplay between stability, delays, and graphs; control-systems-aided human-machine systems; engineering education research; disability research; systems biology

Complex Dynamic Systems and Control Laboratory

The main area of our research is in control systems and mechatronics, with particular focus on

(i) stability analysis and control synthesis of dynamical systems with delays

(ii) interplay between stability, delays, and graphs

(iii) control-systems-aided human-machine systems

(iv) engineering education research

Complex Dynamic Systems and Control Laboratory

Selected Research Projects

Selected Publications

  • Wang, D., Ramirez, A., Sipahi, R., 2021, “Delay Margin Comparison in a Velocity-only vs. Headway-only Connected Vehicle Model,” Journal of Systems and Control Engineering, Special Issue CoDIT 2020, available online: https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/J2NJGIJ5MQZXXYRJVYH7/full.
  • Fan, H., Ramirez, A., Sipahi, R., 2022, “Consensus Stability of a Large Scale Robotic Network under Input and Transmission Delays”, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 9(2), 789-799.
  • Ramirez, A., Sipahi, R., Méndez-Barrios, C.F., Leyva, J., 2021, Derivative-Dependent Control of a Fuel Cell System with a Safe Implementation: An Artificial Delay Approach, accepted, Journal of Systems and Control Engineering, Special Issue CoDIT 2020, available online May 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/09596518211012784
  • Tzounas, G., Sipahi, R., Milano, F., 2021, Damping Power System Electromechanical Oscillations Using Time Delays, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, 68(6), 2725-2735. 1109/TCSI.2021.3062970
  • Ramirez, A., Breda, D., Sipahi, R., 2021, A scalable approach to compute delay margin of a class of neutral-type time delay systems, SIAM Control and Optimization, 59(2), 805-824.
  • Lehotzky, D., Sipahi, R., Zupanc, G.K.H., 2021, Cellular automata modeling suggests symmetric stem-cell division, cell death, and cell drift as key mechanisms driving adult spinal cord growth in teleost fish, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 509, 110474 available online.
  • Wang, D., Sipahi, R., 2021, Stability of a Large-Scale Connected Vehicle Network under Communication, Sensor, and Human Reaction Delays, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 23(1), 663-667. available online.
  • Sipahi, R., Porfiri, M., 2020, Improving on Transfer Entropy-based Network Reconstruction using Time-delays, Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, available online https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5115510.

PhD

Aug 25, 2023

Fan Receives ASME Design Engineering Division Best Paper Award

Haonan Fan, PhD’24, mechanical engineering, received the 2023 Best Paper Award of the ASME Design Engineering Division for “DC Motor Velocity Control with Integral Retarded Controller Under Unintentional Delay” at the 2023 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference.

Faculty

Jul 05, 2023

Faculty and Students Participate in Technical Exchange Meeting at U.S. Army DEVCOM DAC

Four project teams from across the country came together for the first time at the U.S. Army Armor and Cavalry collection in Fort Moore, Georgia for a Technical Exchange Meeting. These projects assist the Army by increasing capabilities to assess AI in the future, while letting students and faculty learn directly from soldiers about the operation of ground combat vehicles.

Deniz Erdogmus

Faculty

May 24, 2023

Kostas Research Institute Receives $13M U.S. Army Contract for Wireless Research

The Kostas Research Institute (KRI) at Northeastern University has been awarded $13 million by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory for foundational research into Cognitive Distributed Sensing in Congested Radio Frequency Environments. KRI and five partner institutions will conduct innovative research to enable technologies in distributed machine learning, signal processing algorithms, and computational, sensing, and communication hardware infrastructure for distributed sensing and communication.

Faculty

Jan 25, 2023

Announcing Spring 2023 PEAK Experiences Awardees

Several engineering students and science students mentored by COE faculty are recipients of Northeastern’s Spring 2023 PEAK Experiences Awards. Base Camp Awardees Sophia Nguyen COE’26, “Neuromodulation of Motor Cortex’s Response to Different Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Pulse Waveforms” Mentor: Mathew Yarossi, Bouvé, Physical Therapy/Movement/Rehab Science This project seeks to use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a noninvasive […]

Faculty

Nov 02, 2022

2022 Stanford University Annual Assessment of Author Citations

The following COE professors are among the top scientists worldwide selected by Stanford University representing the top 2 percent of the most-cited scientists with single-year impact in various disciplines. The selection is based on the top 100,000 by c-score (with and without self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or above. The list below includes […]

Faculty

Jul 14, 2022

Using Background Checks to Find Trends in Gun Purchases

MIE Professor Rifat Sipahi and mechanical engineering student Xu Wang, PhD’25, have been studying firearm background checks to determine trends in gun acquisitions. What is driving gun purchases in the US? It may have to do with who is in the White House Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images It’s well reasoned that there are more […]

Faculty

Apr 15, 2022

Faculty and Staff Awards 2022

Congratulations to all the winners of the faculty and staff awards, and to everyone for their hard work and dedication during the 2021-2022 academic school year.

Faculty

Feb 04, 2022

Announcing Spring 2022 PEAK Experiences Awardees

Several engineering students and science students mentored by COE faculty are recipients of Northeastern’s Spring 2022 PEAK Experiences Awards.

student sitting on wall at Northeastern University

Spotlight Story

Nov 06, 2020

Making the Shoe Fit

In many ways, mechanical engineers are like superheroes. They look like you or me out on the street, but when they get to work they can solve almost any problem, big or small. Gabrielle Whittle, E’21, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering at Northeastern, comes by her interest in mechanical engineering naturally. Her father is […]

Rifat Sipahi

Faculty

Apr 21, 2020

Patent for Validating MRAC for Human-in-the-Loop Control Systems

MIE Professor Rifat Sipahi was awarded a patent for “Validating and computing stability limits of human-in-the-loop adaptive control systems”.

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