Naira Hovakimyan, a professor and Schaller Faculty Scholar in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2011 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Mechanics and Control of Flight Award, “For ground-breaking work in L1 robust adaptive control of nonlinear uncertain systems, vision-based guidance, navigation and control, and cooperative path planning of UAVs."
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Naira Hovakimyan, a professor and Schaller Faculty Scholar in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2011 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Mechanics and Control of Flight Award, “For ground-breaking work in L1 robust adaptive control of nonlinear uncertain systems, vision-based guidance, navigation and control, and cooperative path planning of UAVs."
Naira Hoyakimyan
Naira Hovakimyan
This prestigious award honors an outstanding recent technical or scientific contribution by an individual in the mechanics, guidance, or control of flight in space or the atmosphere.
In spring 2010, Hovakimyan pioneered the first successful flight of an all-adaptive flight control system on NASA’s AirSTAR test vehicle. Her novel L1 adaptive control flight system, developed with her former postdoctoral student Chengyu Cao (now at the University of Connecticut), aims to improve the performance and safety of aircraft in the presence of uncertainties, which refer to anything that cannot be modeled perfectly, such as turbulence. Hovakimyan added that aircraft applications present the right testbed for testing the performance of adaptive controllers due to their large variations in speed and altitudes.
Hovakimyan received her PhD in physics and mathematics at the Institute of Applied Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow. Her math expertise has enabled her to address a long-standing open problem in adaptive control theory, which provides new opportunities for addressing control problems in the presence of large uncertainties with guaranteed performance, breaking new ground toward avoiding certain catastrophic airplane crashes.
Hovakimyan will receive the award on August 9 at the AIAA Guidance Navigation and Control Conference in Portland, Oregon.
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Contact:Naira Hovakimyan, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, 217/244-1672.
Writer:William Bowman, associate director of communications, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, 217/244-0901.
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.