Draper Laboratory is an American non-profit research and development organization, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts; its official name is The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. The laboratory specializes in the design, development, and deployment of advanced technology solutions to problems in national security, space exploration, health care and energy.
Charles Stark "Doc" Draper was an American scientist and engineer, known as the "father of inertial navigation". He was the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory, later renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, which made the Apollo Moon landings possible through the Apollo Guidance Computer it designed for NASA.
A vibrating structure gyroscope (VSG), defined by the IEEE as a Coriolis vibratory gyroscope (CVG), is a gyroscope that uses a vibrating structure to determine the rate of rotation. A vibrating structure gyroscope functions much like the halteres of flies.
Bradford Parkinson is an American engineer and inventor, retired United States Air Force Colonel and Emeritus Professor at Stanford University. He is best known as the lead architect, advocate and developer, with early contributions from Ivan Getting and Roger Easton, of the Air Force NAVSTAR program, better known as Global Positioning System.
Non evaporable getters (NEG), based on the principle of metallic surface sorption of gas molecules, are mostly porous alloys or powder mixtures of Al, Zr, Ti, V and Fe. They help to establish and maintain vacuums by soaking up or bonding to gas molecules that remain within a partial vacuum. This is done through the use of materials that readily form stable compounds with active gases. They are important tools for improving the performance of many vacuum systems. Sintered onto the inner surface of high vacuum vessels, the NEG coating can be applied even to spaces that are narrow and hard to pump out, which makes it very popular in particle accelerators where this is an issue. The main sorption parameters of the kind of NEGs, like pumping speed and sorption capacity, have low limits.
An inertial navigation system is a navigation device that uses motion sensors (accelerometers), rotation sensors (gyroscopes) and a computer to continuously calculate by dead reckoning the position, the orientation, and the velocity of a moving object without the need for external references. Often the inertial sensors are supplemented by a barometric altimeter and sometimes by magnetic sensors (magnetometers) and/or speed measuring devices. INSs are used on mobile robots and on vehicles such as ships, aircraft, submarines, guided missiles, and spacecraft. Older INS systems generally used an inertial platform as their mounting point to the vehicle and the terms are sometimes considered synonymous.
Paul B. Ruffin is an American scientist and educator. He is active in the field of applied science during his career as a research physicist conducting exploratory and advanced research and development in Fiber-optic communication, Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and Nanotechnology at the U. S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center (AMRDEC). In July 2003, Ruffin was promoted to the highest rank for a research scientist — Senior Research Scientist (ST) — that anyone could achieve in Government service, making him the first African American to ever attain such status in the Civilian Army workforce.
Bir Bhanu is the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns Endowed University of California Presidential Chair in Engineering, the Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Cooperative Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering, at the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). He is the first Founding Faculty of the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering at UCR and served as the Founding Chair of Electrical Engineering from 1/1991 to 6/1994 and the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Intelligent Systems (CRIS) from 4/1998 to 6/2019. He has been the director of Visualization and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (VISLab) at UCR since 1991. He was the Interim Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at UCR from 7/2014 to 6/2016. Additionally, he has been the Director of the NSF Integrative Graduate Education, Research and Training (IGERT) program in Video Bioinformatics at UC Riverside. Dr. Bhanu has been the principal investigator of various programs for NSF, DARPA, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, ARO and other agencies and industries in the areas of object/target recognition, learning and vision, image/video understanding, image/video databases with applications in security, defense, intelligence, biological and medical imaging and analysis, biometrics, autonomous navigation and industrial machine vision.
Pressure reference system (PRS) is an enhancement of the inertial reference system and attitude and heading reference system designed to provide position angles measurements which are stable in time and do not suffer from long term drift caused by the sensor imperfections. The measurement system uses behavior of the International Standard Atmosphere where atmospheric pressure descends with increasing altitude and two pairs of measurement units. Each pair measures pressure at two different positions that are mechanically connected with known distance between units, e.g. the units are mounted at the tips of the wing. In horizontal flight, there is no pressure difference measured by the measurement system which means the position angle is zero. In case the airplane banks (to turn), the tips of the wings mutually change their positions, one is going up and the second one is going down, and the pressure sensors in every unit measure different values which are translated into a position angle.
Richard Stephen Muller is an American professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley.
The hemispherical resonator gyroscope (HRG), also called wine-glass gyroscope or mushroom gyro, is a compact, low-noise, high-performance angular rate or rotation sensor. An HRG is made using a thin solid-state hemispherical shell, anchored by a thick stem. This shell is driven to a flexural resonance by electrostatic forces generated by electrodes which are deposited directly onto separate fused-quartz structures that surround the shell. The gyroscopic effect is obtained from the inertial property of the flexural standing waves. Although the HRG is a mechanical system, it has no moving parts, and can be very compact.
Kurt E. Petersen is an American inventor and entrepreneur. He is known primarily for his work on microelectromechanical systems. Petersen was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering in 2001.
Roger Thomas Howe is the William E. Ayer Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He earned a B.S. degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 and 1984, respectively. He was a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1984-1985, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1985-1987, and at UC Berkeley between 1987-2005, where he was the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor. He has been a faculty member of the School of Engineering at Stanford since 2005.
Reza Ghodssi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he directs the MEMS Sensors and Actuators Lab and holds the Herbert Rabin Distinguished Chair in Engineering. Ghodssi is also the Inaugural Executive Director of Research and Innovation for the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University System of Maryland at Southern Maryland (USMSM). He is best known for his work designing micro- and nano-devices for healthcare applications, particularly for systems requiring small-scale energy conversion and biological and chemical sensing.
Srinivas Tadigadapa is a professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. From 2000 to 2017 he was a professor of electrical engineering at Penn State University. Prior to that, he was the vice president of manufacturing at Integrated Sensing Systems Inc., and was involved with the design, fabrication, packaging, reliability, and manufacturing of micromachined silicon pressure and Coriolis flow sensors.
Xin Zhang is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University (BU).
John X. J. Zhang is a tenured professor at Thayer School of Engineering of Dartmouth College, and an investigator in the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Before joining Dartmouth, he was an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas(UT Austin). He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, California in 2004, and was a research scientist in systems biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before joining the faculty at UT Austin in 2005. Zhang is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and a recipient of the 2016 NIH Director's Transformative Research Award.
James Julius Spilker Jr. was an American engineer and a consulting professor in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at Stanford University. He was one of the principal architects of the Global Positioning System (GPS). He was a co-founder of the space communications company Stanford Telecommunications, and was most recently executive chairman of AOSense Inc., Sunnyvale, CA.
Albert P. Pisano is an American academic. He serves as dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego, a position he has held since September 2013. Pisano publishes a monthly Dean's column that introduces the monthly news email from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. The January 2022 dean's column, "Math matters to all of us" triggered significant conversation on Pisano's LinkedIn feed.
Shekhar Bhansali is the division director in Electrical, Communication and Cyber Systems (ECCS) at the National Science Foundation. He also serves as an Alcatel-Lucent Professor and Distinguished University Professor in the Florida International University (FIU) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Bhansali’s main research interests are in nanotechnology, biosensors, and microfluidics. He holds 40 patents, has published over 300 publications, and has advised more than 40 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows in research. He was elevated to a Fellow of the IEEE in 2023.
