February 23, 2015
Maruthi Akella, associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, was selected as an Outstanding Young Aerospace Engineer to the Texas A&M Aerospace Alumni Academy for 2015.
The Texas A&M Distinguished Aerospace Engineering Alumni Academy was established to recognize the accomplishments of outstanding alumni, champion the aerospace engineering profession, create a sense of community/camaraderie within the department, and facilitate interaction/continuity with the student body and our alumni and corporate friends.
According to the A&M website, the Outstanding Young Aerospace Engineer award is presented to an alumnus who has a strong commitment and interest in the university and who has shown outstanding work in his or her field as a promising future leader. Akella will be honored this May during the academy’s Aerospace Engineering Annual Awards Banquet.
Akella began serving on the Cockrell School of Engineering faculty in 1999. He specializes in the control of complex dynamical systems that are subject to large scale nonlinearities and uncertainties and directs the Controls Lab for Distributed and Uncertain Systems (C-DUS) within the Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Department at UT Austin.
His current research encompasses control theoretic investigations and experimental validation of a wide variety of complex engineered dynamical systems that include autonomous space vehicles and mobile robots; flow-control systems for high-speed and hypersonic vehicles; miniature robots navigating inside GPS denied environments; uncertainty quantification; and cooperative control and collaborative sensing problems in swarm robots. His theoretical contributions have found several highly successful applications in astrodynamics and in the control of space systems and vision-guided robotics.
Akella is also affiliated with the Center for Space Research and has engaged in active collaborations with the Wireless Networking and Communications Group and the Center for Aeromechanics Research. He is a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society and Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
