# Prateek Shah

> Robotics and Control Systems | Ph.D.

Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/prateekshah

Experienced Controls Engineer with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley, specializing in robust control, model predictive control, convex optimization, reinforcement learning and data-driven methods.

Driving the future of connectivity as a Senior Controls Engineer at Taara Connect Inc. I leverage my expertise in control systems design and implementation to advance Taara's groundbreaking wireless optical communication technology. This includes a focus on ensuring the precision and reliability of their light-based links through sophisticated control of beam steering, wavefront sensing, and real-time adjustments. Thrilled to be part of a team making high-speed internet accessible globally.

## Work Experience
### Sr Controls Software Engineer @ Taara
Jan 2025 – Present | Sunnyvale, CA
Driving the future of connectivity as a Senior Controls Engineer at Taara Connect Inc. I leverage my expertise in control systems design and implementation to advance Taara's groundbreaking wireless optical communication technology. This includes a focus on ensuring the precision and reliability of their light-based links through sophisticated control of beam steering, wavefront sensing, and real-time adjustments. Thrilled to be part of a team making high-speed internet accessible globally.

### Controls Design Engineer @ Western Digital
Jan 2020 – Jan 2025 | San Jose, California, United States
Responsible for high performance and robust feedback controller, and time-domain track switching controller design, and real-time servo firmware development for enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDD). 
DEVELOPMENT:
1) Lead track Seeking Designer for five enterprise products: including air drive, helium drive and multi actuator drive technology
2) Designed Seeking signals to exceed input-output performance targets and meet reliability requirements for all five products
3) Analyzed and built multiple prototypes to configure the best possible design in conjunction of our sister Mechanical Team
4) Developed a new reliability testing tool to expand the operational boundary conditions and capture outliers effectively 
5) Provided Failure Analysis support for manufacturing and reliability testing along with prototyping new technologies
6) Evaluated the feasibility and sustainability of the hard disk drive in customer data-centre environments
RESEARCH:
1) Developed new HDD track switching techniques based on modern control approaches to substitute traditional methodologies 
2) Designed data driven feedforward control systems for shock rejection and vibration suppression in multi actuator drives
3) Designed features to minimize jerk imparted by actuator activation and optimize for random transient vibration

### Graduate Student Researcher @ University of California, Berkeley
Jan 2015 – Jan 2020 | Berkeley
I obtained my Ph.D. in the field of Control Systems under Prof. Roberto Horowitz at UC Berkeley. Here are some highlights of my work as a graduate student researcher:
 
1) ROBUST FEEDBACK-FEEDFORWARD CONTROL DESIGN – FREQUENCY RESPONSE DATA DRIVEN APPROACH

1) Developed a Robust Control Design Tool: Created an advanced tool for simultaneous design of stabilizing feedback controller and vibration suppressing feedforward controller, leveraging frequency response measurements of the actuators and their vibration interactions
2) Innovative Methodology: Designed a novel a H_2-H_∞ control algorithm tailored for multi-input multi-output systems 
3) Data Driven Robustness: Utilized multiple sets of frequency response actuator data and vibration data to create a common feedback controller meeting performance and reliability targets; Convex H_∞ constraints ensure closed-loop stability with good gain and phase margins
4) Vibration Suppression: Designed and implemented a fixed feedforward controller using the data driven approach; Added an adaptive control element to modify the fixed control action; Finally added an input shaper to reduce vibration at source

TRAJECTORY FOLLOWING - MODEL PREDICTIVE CONTROL (MPC) + REINFORCEMENT LEARNING		                           
1) Developed a MPC Simulation Tool:  Created an output feedback model predictive control design to follow a pre-defined trajectory with constraints on stroke usage of all control actuators. System Example: Highway lane changing  
2) Reinforcement Learning Approach: Trained a droid model based on the same pre-defined reference trajectory using a four layered neural network; Updated the training set with measurement data from the MPC tool 
3) Implementation: Developed an explicit closed form MPC solution to implement this method on a hard disk drive (HDDs); HDDs have limited computation power and it is imperative to solve majority of the control problem offline

### Engineer Intern @ Tata Steel
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Jamshedpur

### Engineer Intern @ Honeywell Process Solutions
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013


## Education
### Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Mechanical Engineering - Control Systems, Robotics and Optimization
University of California, Berkeley

### Bachelor of Technology (BTech) in Mechanical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/prateekshah15

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Source: https://flows.cv/prateekshah
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/prateekshah/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-01