Thomas B. Sheridan (born December 23, 1929) is an American professor of mechanical engineering and Applied Psychology Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He has also received an honorary doctorate from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
[1] He was co-editor of the MIT Press journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments and served on several editorial boards; and was editor of IEEE Transactions on Man-Machine Systems.
[1][2] His research interests are in experimentation, modeling, and design of human-machine systems in air, highway and rail transportation, space and undersea robotics, process control, arms control, telemedicine, and virtual reality.
[1] Working at MIT, Sheridan developed important concepts concerning human–robot interaction, particularly regarding supervisory control and telepresence.
Robotics and telepresence is just one manifestation of his interest the boundary between human and automatic control.