Aerospace engineer earns coveted award
October 7, 2009
STARKVILLE, Miss. –Dr. Ming Xin, an assistant professor in aerospace engineering, has been named a recipient of the prestigious 2009 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF awarded $400,000 to Xin in support of his efforts to continue his research on developing practical methods to make air and spacecraft flight control systems run more efficiently. The formal title of the single, principal, investigator project is “Unified Optimal Control and Estimation of Nonlinear Dynamic Systems with Closed-Form Solutions.”
“For instance let’s say you want to move a spacecraft vehicle from one orbit to another using minimum fuel or you want a missile to intercept the target in minimal time, that is considered optimization of the control systems,” explained Xin.
This research topic has been performed for almost 50 years. Traditionally, scientists simplify existing air and spacecraft flight dynamics in order to design an optimal controller, which may not work well for realistic systems. As a result many numerical methods have been researched to improve the control performance. However, they are very complicated and create a high computational load that cannot be applied in real time.
“What I’m trying to do is develop a more efficient analytical solution, so you can easily implement that controller to your systems, without a very high computational load,” said Xin. “Right now I’m doing the fundamental research on this new control theory, the next step will be implementing and testing algorithm software to the air and spacecraft control systems and run it in real-time to get truly optimized vehicle performance.”
Xin earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China. He came to America in 1998 to study aerospace engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (formerly University of Missouri-Rolla) and earned his doctorate degree in 2002. He worked in a post doctorate role at MUST for four years and joined the Bagley College of Engineering (BCoE) in 2006. Xin is a senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
“The CAREER Award is an extremely competitive award given annually by the National Science Foundation to the most gifted young faculty members,” said Sarah Rajala, dean of the BCoE. “We are extremely proud to have Dr. Ming Xin on the Mississippi State team and look forward to following his groundbreaking accomplishments throughout his career.”
The CAREER Program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.