CTO and founder at Bechamo, providing software-enabled control solutions

Chief Architect, Principal Controls Engineer and Technical Advisor

Lead controls engineer and chief systems architect.

Rockwell Collins acquired Athena Technologies in the beginning of April, 2008.I work on manned and unmanned system modeling and flight control design. Experience Gained:Chief Engineer responsible for the avionics on an optionally piloted 350 foot airship. Managed a team of over 50 people during a 1.5 year rapid development program to create a fly-by-wire redundant flight control, vehicle management system, engine control, and ground control station. Led the program from proposal win to execution.Chief Engineer and control engineer on a variety of flight control applications: Airships, unmanned airplane, helicopter, ducted fan, VTOL airplane (Aurora Excalibur), guided munition, manned OPV.Principal inventor of all-attitude flight control for VTOL and fixed-wing airplanes. Flew this under DARPA damage tolerance flight control.Helped customers with architecture layout for flight controls and systems engineering, taking into account contingencies and redundancy.Customer presentations, business development, proposal writing, and product support and debugging.

I work as chief engineer and control design engineer many different types of control systems. I also serve as systems engineer and project lead on programs I work on.Experience Gained:Systems Engineering, Aerodynamics, Engine control, Quaternion math, Estimation, Ducted Fan modeling and control design, Helicopter modeling and control design, airplane modeling and control design.

I designed control algorithms for the IBOT stair climbing and balancing wheelchair. I also worked on the Segway HT and have a patent with Dean Kamen on a turning control device used on the latest version of the Segway.Experience gained:C++, Fixed-point coding, Software validation process, Patent on Segway turning control

Helped write and won DARPA 1.6 mil proposals for a novel ground robot with integrated PDA interface.

I developed Linux software for this startup company, started by a colleague of mine. The software I wrote was a real-time multi-threaded navigation system with a content server.Experience Gained:Linux administration, Linux multi-threaded programming, web server setup and administration, Perl

Designed avionics, flight control algorithms, and ground station software for a startup company's unmanned helicopter program. I developed a stability augmentation system based on a distributed architecture and flew it on one of the existing robust helicopter platforms. Due to the small engineering group (one person besides myself), I designed everything needed to accomplish this, including wiring schematics, embedded software, ground station GUI, simulation, and control design.Experience Gained:Electrical schematic design, small business setup and operation, National Instrument's Labwindows.

Designed algorithms for several different types of applications including the International Space Station, Satellite pointing, autonomous helicopters, embedded software, and simulation modeling. I performed groundbreaking work on a the DARPA SEC program by recognizing how RC pilots perform aggressive maneuvers and reproducing the behavior in a high-fidelity simulation. The work was published with a professor (Eric Feron) at MIT in the International Journal of Robotics Research.Experience Gained: MATLAB, Simulink, Digital Circuit design, Real-time software, Control Design