January 8, 2014
Maruthi Akella has been elected fellow of the American Astronautical Society (AAS). Fellowship is conferred in recognition of “significant and unique contributions to astronautics, space science, space engineering, space education and outreach, and service to AAS.” The number of AAS fellows elected per year is limited to within 1% of total membership and is typically around four to six members.
Newly elected fellows will be recognized at the AAS Goddard Symposium Honors and Awards Luncheon to be held in Greenbelt, MD on March 5, 2014.
Akella’s research interests include nonlinear dynamical systems, cooperative control and collaborative sensing problems in swarm robots, that include autonomous space vehicles and mobile robots, high-speed and hypersonic vehicle flow-control systems, miniature robots navigating in GPS denied environments, and uncertainty quantification.
Most recently, his research team performed a field test to demonstrate the autonomous flight capability of UAV teams, which will be used by NASA’s IceBridge program to collect environmental data in the Arctic and polar regions, including data on melting glaciers.
Akella has served on the Cockrell School of Engineering faculty since 1999. He is the director of the Controls Lab for Distributed and Uncertain Systems (C-DUS) in the ASE/EM department.
