Professor Maurice Heemels of the Department Mechanical Engineering receives a VICI grant for his research proposal entitled "Wireless Control Systems, A New Frontier in Automation. The official announcement of all Vici winners is on February 1, 2011. VICI grants can be maximum a half million Euros. VICI are targeted at senior researchers who have successfully demonstrated they can develop their own innovative line of research and can act as coaches for young researchers. The grant provides an opportunity to build a research group.

Wireless control systems
Since February 2010 Heemels (1972) is professor of the new research group Hybrid and Networked Systems. He wants to use the Vici to apply wireless communication in control systems. "Wireless and control are traditionally opposites: wireless has a degree of unreliability in the sense that signals often arrive at irregular intervals. Traditional control systems cannot support that. We therefore want to develop new control algorithms that can fully cooperate with wireless communications. "Wireless control can, according Heemels, be useful in high-tech machines with moving parts and in controlling large-scale systems.

Other granted Vici subsdies at TU/e
Besides Heemels also Professor Erik Bakkers (Applied Physics) and Prof. Mark Peletier (Mathematics and Computer Science and the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS) receive a Vici grant. Peletier does his work amongst others with researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.