Farhad Aghili - Inventor

Role at the Canadian Space Agency

He received the B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering ('88) and M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering ('91) from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran.
Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University, Montreal, in 1998.

Dr. Aghili is a research scientist with the Space Exploration of CSA. He worked on various robotics and mechatronics projects such as development of a robot emulation scheme for the SPDM (Dextre) task verification facility, visual guided robotic capturing of a tumbling satellite for on-orbit servicing (OSS), design and development of reconfigurable robots with lockable telescopic links, zero-G satellite emulator, mechatronics testbed for testing joint prototypes of a manipulator, robust vision system for pose estimation of space objects, adaptive control of constrained and unconstrained manipulators, force/moment accommodation control of tele-operated manipulators, time-optimal control of spacecraft, on-orbit calibration of the Dextre force/moment sensor, fault-tolerant control of manipulators and electric motors, robust force control of hydraulic actuators, adaptive and fault-tolerant control of electric motors, optimal design of torque sensor and loadcell, modeling and control of constrained mechanical systems using non-minimal model, robust force/motion control and impedance control of manipulators, control of parallel mechanisms, adaptive cooperative control of manipulators with kinematics uncertainties, control of space manipulators, 3-D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of vehicles, and localization of mobile robots using RTK GPS and IMU.

During 1994-1997, he was a Research Engineer at MPB Technologies, Montreal, working on development of actuator and sensor systems for ultra precision robots.
During 1988-1992, he was a machine tool designer at Pooyandan Eng. Co., Tehran, where he designed various machine tools as i) a special purpose machine with a six-station index table for automatic machining (boring, drilling, and tapping) of gate-values; ii) a steel wire coiler; iii) a wire pointer machine; iv) an hydraulic fixture; v) a hydraulic feeding unit.

Dr. Aghili won the best paper award in 2007 ASME/IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics Systems and he received the CSA Inventor & Innovator Certificate six times. He was the co-author of the finalist for the Best Student-Paper award in IEEE Int. Conference on Control Applications, 2005. Dr. Aghili received CSA Appreciation award in recognition of his contribution to the STVF project in 2003.