Dr. Warren Dixon

Newton C. Ebaugh Professor and Department Chair
Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, UF

Dr. Warren Dixon and his students are focused on the development of theoretical methods motivated by systems that exhibit uncertain nonlinear behaviors. His approach to compensate for uncertainties in the dynamics is the development of adaptive and learning control methods. Recent projects have focused on the development of control systems for robotic agents where sensor information is intermittent.

Dr. Dixon’s Naval Surface Warfare Center project Collaborative Autonomous Maritime Vehicles for MCM Missions focuses on collaborative unmanned surface vehicles (USV) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) for mine countermeasure (MCM) missions and aims to optimize time, energy, and sensing resources to develop a percentage clearance estimate. This proposal investigates computationally efficient optimal control solutions for a network of MCM AUVs despite constrained sensing/communication. The specific project objectives include:

Dr. Dixon’s Office of Naval Research project Approximate Optimal Online Continuous-Time Path-Planning Methods is focused on developing path-planning methods to operate in the complex littoral environment that optimally react to uncertain conditions. The specific project objectives include: