Dr Praveen Kumar Muthusamy

Dr. Praveen Kumar Muthusamy is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He previously worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Khalifa University, UAE and as a Research Associate at University of New South Wales (UNSW) at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra, Australia. 

Praveen obtained his B.E. in electrical and electronics engineering with focus on portable automated physiological measurement device, in Anna University, India and pursed his M.S. in electrical engineering with specialisation in intelligent control system based on fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks, in Yuan Ze University, Taiwan. He then pursued his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering with focus on developing intelligent control system for aerial robots in UNSW Canberra, where he developed a unique control system by designing the bidirectional brain emotional learning algorithm which can adapt from scratch (zero initial weights) to any non-linear system. He worked with the Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group in Australia which funded three projects to expand his research to different aerial robots such as flapping wing, quadcopter and 32g nano helicopter for various applications.

Praveen continued his research in the field of aerial robotics as a postdoctoral fellow by developing an online optimisation technique that can significantly improve the reliability of the aerial system under extreme wind disturbance and simplified the tuning process. He then worked on integrating a two-finger gripper to the aerial system to perform aerial manipulation for long objects using a single UAV especially under extreme wind disturbance. He also worked on variable stiffness actuators that can be exploited for aerial robots for the application of human robot interaction.

He further contributed to expanding his work to stabilise a 31 g nano quadcopter UAV in extreme conditions with active disturbance rejection capabilities. Currently he is working on drone to drone localisation and advanced drone robotics applications.