Stratis Kanarachos

I graduated in 2001 from the Mechanical Engineering Course at National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece where I earned also my Ph.D. degree in 2004 by successfully defending my thesis ‘Analysis of Mechanisms using the Finite Element Method’.

I was holding the position of Lecturer and Assistant Professor at Frederick University (Cyprus) for the periods 2005-2007 and 2007-2012 respectively. It was in my duties to teach the courses “Vehicle Dynamics and Control”, “Mechanical Vibrations and Machine Dynamics”, “Dynamics”, “Engineering Design and Numerical Optimization” and “Quantitative Methods in Engineering Management” in the Programmes of study “BSc in Mechanical Engineering”, “BSc in Automotive Engineering” and “MSc in Engineering Management”.

In the period 2012-2014 I was working at the Integrated Vehicle Safety Department of TNO, the Netherlands as a senior researcher. State estimatation, integrated vehicle controller concepts and model reduction techniques were my main research areas.

My main inspiration is to study, design and develop systems with superior performance. Efficiently controlling in real-time the motion of a system while respecting various constraints (actuator saturation, state limitations, non-linear dynamics) and performance requirements (energy consumption, comfort, fatigue) is a highly nonlinear problem for which no closed form solutions exist.

What I hope to achieve in the next five years is to significantly contribute to the development of a highly energy efficient autonomous suspension system with particular focus on passenger comfort and to the development of an autonomous vehicle with provably improved predictive capability.