Naomi Ehrich Leonard

Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Leonard has made fundamental theoretical and applied contributions to dynamics and control, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary engineering and science. Early, she focused on design and control of under-actuated nonlinear mechanical systems using geometry and group theory. Later, her research expanded to feedback and interaction in multi-agent system dynamics, and development of decentralized control design methodologies for coordinated exploration and environmental monitoring with mobile sensor networks. She directed an ambitious, collaborative program on adaptive ocean sensing networks, with open-ocean trials in Monterey Bay, CA where six robotic underwater gliders operated on their own for 24 days using coordinating feedback laws. In collaboration with biologists and cognitive psychologists, she has studied mechanisms of collective animal behavior and human decision-making with an eye towards integrated human/automated systems. She has also explored the intersection of engineering and art; one project, Flock Logic, used designed feedback to develop choreographic tools for dance. Author of more than 120 archival articles and refereed conference papers, a pedagogical text on the use of MATLAB in control design, and two edited volumes of workshop proceedings. Senior editor,IEEE Transactions on Control of Networked Systems; past Associate editor, Automatica and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. Fellow, MacArthur Foundation, Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineering, and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.