Aeronautics and Astronautics
Showing 11-20 of 217 Results
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Manan Arya
Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsManan Arya leads the Morphing Space Structures Laboratory. His research is on structures that can adapt their shape to respond to changing requirements. Examples include deployable structures for spacecraft that can stow in constrained volumes for launch and then unfold to larger sizes in space, terrestrial structures with variable geometry, and morphing robots. Key research thrusts include lightweight fiber-reinforced composite materials to enable innovative designs for flexible structures, and the algorithmic generation of the geometry of morphing structures – the arrangement of stiff and compliant elements – to enable novel folding mechanisms.
He has published more than 20 journal and conference papers and has been awarded 5 US patents. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a Technologist at the Advanced Deployable Structures Laboratory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where he developed and tested breakthrough designs for space structures, including deployable reflectarrays, starshades, and solar arrays. -
Somil Bansal
Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
BioSomil Bansal is an assistant professor at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford. Before joining Stanford, he was an assistant professor in the ECE department at the University of Southern California. He received an MS and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) from the University of California at Berkeley in 2014 and 2020, respectively. Before that, he obtained a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2012. After his PhD, he spent a year as a Research Scientist at Waymo (formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car project). He has also collaborated closely with companies like Skydio, Google, Boeing, as well as NASA AMES/JPL. Somil is broadly interested in developing mathematical tools and algorithms for the control and analysis of safety-critical autonomous and robotic systems, with a special emphasis on ensuring the safety of learning-enabled systems. Somil has received several awards, most notably the NSF CAREER award, the Eli Jury Award at UC Berkeley for his doctoral research, the RSS Pioneer Award, and the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award.
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Juan Blanch
Sr Research Engineer
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research focuses on the design of navigation integrity algorithms for safety critical applications (like air navigation and autonomous driving). I am interested in both the design of practical algorithms that provide the required safety margins, and in the theoretical limits on the performance of the integrity monitoring algorithms.
