Model-reference Adaptive Control: A Primer

Dr. Nhan Nguyen is a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center with 29 years of experience. He is the technical group leader of the Advanced Control and Evolvable Systems research group in the Intelligent Systems Division. He directs and leads 20 researchers, half hold Ph.D. degrees. He served as the NASA project scientist of the NASA Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control Project which had an annual budget of $21 million and a 90-person workforce, and funded 24 research grants in adaptive control to leading researchers in the field from 2007 to 2010. He currently leads a 16-person project team to conduct the development of an advanced aircraft control technology. He has published over 160 peer-reviewed technical publications including 120 publications in control theory and applications and three book chapters. He is the reviewer for many journals including IEEE Transaction on Automatic Control, AIAA Journal of Guidance Dynamics and Control, International Journal of Robustand Nonlinear Control, Automatica, and many others. He received several prestigious awards and medals including NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, two-time NASA Ames Honors for Excellence as Engineer, NASA Space Act Award, and 30 other caeer awards. He holds one U.S. patent, and three patents pending. He has 10 other invention disclosures. He developed several innovative adaptive control methods in the 2000s, one of which was peer-reviewed and selected by NASA for flight-testing on NASA F/A-18A research aircraft. NASA only flight-tested two other adaptive control technologies previously: one on NASA X-15 aircraft in the 1960s and the other on NASA F-15 aircraft in the 2000s. He is the incoming chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Intelligent Systems Technical Committee. He was the conference general chair of AIAA Infotech@Aerospace in 2012. He received an AIAA Distinguished Services Award. He is an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University where he teaches adaptive control, flight dynamics, and advanced dynamics, and aeroelasticity. He received the Lecturer-of-the-Year Award.