The center was founded in 1988 as part of the New York State Center for Advanced Technology program. The program was created 30 years ago to facilitate the transfer of technology from New York’s top research universities into commercially viable products produced in the private sector.
“The Center for Automation Technologies and Systems provides a rich, interdisciplinary environment combining basic and applied research,” says John Wen, an RPI professor of electrical, computer and systems engineering who is also the CATS director. “It serves as a conduit to transfer research results to industrial and commercial applications. [Our] philosophy is to tackle challenging problems with no existing solutions, and extend these problem-specific results to general principles for broader applications.