We are committed to the aggressive development and transition of advanced air vehicle control technology to industry and the war fighter to improve total weapon system lethality, survivability, agility, performance, and affordability. Our long-term objective is to develop adaptive and autonomous control theory for the advancement of future Air Force flight vehicles.

Our current research focuses on autonomous and cooperative control of multiple unmanned air vehicles, guidance and control of aerospace systems, and verification and validation of flight critical software. Specific research areas include (1) multi-objective optimization for cooperative mission planning involving heterogeneous unmanned vehicles interacting with one or more human operators; (2) cooperative ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) techniques for multiple vehicles to locate, identify, and track dynamic targets; (3) cooperative strategies for multiple, heterogeneous unmanned air vehicles performing coupled tasks, including the effects of realistic network communication systems, such as network latency and delays that result in different target state information on different parts of the distributed decision and control system; (4) autonomous and intelligent control algorithm development, including algorithms with the ability to learn improved responses to a dynamic environment; (5) pursuit – evasion games (6) optimization under uncertainty; (7) the propagation of uncertainty through dynamical systems; (8) and formal methods for verification of algorithms & software. Our goals are to develop and validate control algorithms through mathematical analysis and real-time nonlinear simulations and experiments, and to transition technology to benefit the war fighter.

key words

Flight Control; Optimization; Algorithms; Formal Methods, Cooperative Control; Autonomous/Distributed control; Verification and Validation; Autonomy; Game Theory; Intelligent Control; Uncertainty; Nonlinear Control; Dynamical Systems;

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral and Senior applicants