AIAA features Hovakimyan as plenary lecturer

1/18/2019

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Oklahoma State University professor Imraan A. Faruque thanks MechSE professor Naira Hovakimyan for her plenary lecture.
Oklahoma State University professor Imraan A. Faruque thanks MechSE professor Naira Hovakimyan for her plenary lecture.
MechSE professor Naira Hovakimyan gave the GNC Plenary Lecture at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ 2019 Guidance, Navigation, and Controls Conference in San Diego, CA.

In her January 10 talk, titled “Aerial Co-Robots of the Future,” she provided an overview of recent results in flight control development and applications in cooperative flight control.

Parallel developments in aerial robotics are reviewed from the perspective of aerospace industry standards, prioritizing safety, resilience, and reliability of operations. Hovakimyan’s presentation included an overview of flight tests at NASA and Edwards Air Force Base, discussing the broad opportunities for aerial vehicles in public safety, elderly care, package delivery, precision farming, and digital agriculture.

Cooperation between aerial co-robots and humans emphasizes the notion of perceived safety, which is addressed using recent methods from machine learning. Virtual reality is used as safe testing environment for the data collection that helps to build the perceived safety model, which subsequently impacts the path planning and collision avoidance algorithms. She summarized the presentation with a discussion of the integration of aerial co-robots in the sociotechnical society of future.

Hovakimyan is a W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professor in Mechanical Science and Engineering at Illinois. Her research interests are in control and optimization, autonomous systems, neural networks, game theory and their applications in aerospace, robotics, mechanical, agricultural, electrical,  petroleum, biomedical engineering, and elderly care.


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This story was published January 18, 2019.