Dr. John Valasek, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and director of the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, has been elected the chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Intelligent Systems Technical Committee (ISTC).
The ISTC addresses the application of Intelligent System (IS) technologies and methods to aerospace systems, the verification and validation of these systems, and the education of the AIAA membership in the use of IS technologies in aerospace and other technical disciplines. The systems of interest include both military and commercial aerospace systems, and those ground systems that are part of test, development or operations of aerospace systems. These include, but are not limited to, autonomous and expert systems, discrete planning/scheduling algorithms, intelligent data/image processing, learning and adaptive techniques, data fusion and reasoning, and knowledge engineering.
Valasek is a fellow of the AIAA and senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a Thaman Professor of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence and member of the Honors faculty. He has been actively conducting flight mechanics and controls research of manned and unmanned air systems (UAS) in both industry and academia for 33 years. He was previously a flight control engineer for the Northrop Corporation, Aircraft Division where he worked in the Flight Controls Research group, and on the AGM-137 Tri-Services Standoff Attack Missile program.
Valasek was the founding director of the multi-engineering department Center for Autonomous Vehicles and Sensor Systems, where he organized and led funding efforts in underwater, ground, air and space autonomous systems. His research is currently focused on bridging the gap between traditional computer science topics and aerospace engineering topics, and has been funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration and industry. He is a co-patent holder (2006) and leading developer of flight control systems for autonomous air refueling of unmanned air vehicles, and a co-patent holder for the design of a novel UAS (2018).
Valasek is currently a member of the AIAA Unmanned Systems Technical Program Committee, and the AIAA ISTC. He is a former member and chair of the AIAA Atmospheric Flight Mechanics Technical Committee, as well as the AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Technical Committee and the AIAA General Aviation Technical Committee. He is currently an associate editor of the Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics. He earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in 1986 and a master’s degree with honors and doctoral degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Kansas in 1990 and 1995, respectively.
