The Technical Committee on Fully Actuated System Approach, initiated by Academician Duan Guangren from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), was recently established and received approval from the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
This new committee marks an original breakthrough, unlike most IEEE technical committees, which are typically built upon existing research fields. Nine leading academicians in China's control science community, including three presidents of the Chinese Association of Automation, praised the theory as "a groundbreaking, globally recognized innovation in control science" that will have "profound and far-reaching impacts" on the discipline.
Duan has been elected the committee's first chair, with more than 10 HIT professors, including Gao Huijun, Wu Ligang, Zhang Lixian, and Qiu Jianbin, serving as founding members.
The Fully Actuated System Approach is a new control theory proposed by Duan, which has already led over 140 universities and research institutes in more than 20 countries to publish around 530 papers, including nearly 100 in IEEE Transactions and approximately 140 in applied journals.
The theory has resolved challenges that were long unsolved by traditional state-space methods, earning the first-ever Special Prize of the Heilongjiang Provincial Natural Science Award and recognition as one of the "Top Ten Scientific Advances in Chinese Universities". It has also been selected as one of 12 new technical fields for the 2026 International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) World Congress.
In just four years, the annual International Conference on Fully Actuated System Theory and Applications has grown from 150 participants to a global event attracting more than 1,000 scholars.