Rush D. Robinett III

Biography

Dr. Robinett specializes in nonlinear control and optimal system design of energy, robotics, and aerospace systems. Of particular interest in the energy arena is the distributed, decentralized nonlinear control and optimization of networked microgrids with up to 100% penetration of transient renewable energy sources (i.e., photovoltaics and wind turbines).  At 100% penetration, the optimal design of energy storage systems is critical to the stability and performance of networked microgrids because all of the spinning inertia and fossil fuel of the generators have been removed from the system.  In the robotics area, collective control of teams of simple, dumb robots that solve complicated problems is of continuing research interest.  The application areas span the space from chemical plume tracing of buried land mines to underwater detection of targets of interest to airborne surveillance systems to spacecraft formations.  In the aerospace area, system identification, trajectory optimization, guidance algorithm development, and autopilot design form the fundamentals of all of these research topics.  These fundamentals are presently being applied to stall flutter suppression and meta-stable controller design research.