User:Junkins1943/John L. Junkins

John L. Junkins
John L. Junkins (born May 23, 1943) is a Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University specializing in spacecraft navigation, guidance, dynamics and control. He is married to Elouise, and has two children, J. Stephen, and Kathryn.

Education

 * Auburn University, Aerospace Engineering, B.A.E., 1965.
 * UCLA, Engineering, M.S., 1967.
 * UCLA, Engineering, Ph.D., 1969.

Appointments
Texas A&M University, College Station TX 77843-3141  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia
 * Director of the Texas A&M University Institute of Advanced Studies, 2011-
 * Holds the Royce E. Wisenbaker Chair, 2006 -
 * Regents Professor, 2002 -
 * Holder of the George J. Eppright Chair, 1989 - 2006
 * Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering, 1998 -
 * Director, Center for Mechanics and Control 1991 -
 * TEES Distinguished Chair, (1985 - 1989)
 * Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, 1978 - 1985

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
 * Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, 1974 - 1978.
 * Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering, 1970 - 1974.

McDonnell Douglas Astronautics, Co., Santa Monica California
 * Engineer/Scientist, 1966 - 1970

NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
 * Aerospace Engineer, 1965 - 1966.
 * Engineering Aide (Co-op student), 1962 - 1964.

Professional Accomplishments
Dr. John Junkins has advised over 100 graduate students including 45 completed PhD students. He has about 400 professional publications, including over 230 archival papers, 6 books and several patents. His work has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Journal of Astronautical Science, the Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, and the Journal of Guidance, Control, & Dynamics. His work has supported over a dozen spaceflight missions and his inventions have also led to several commercial products including navigation sensors for autonomous aerial refueling of aircraft, and for pointing navigation of spacecraft based on star pattern recognition and an early 1990s electronic whiteboard. His research is focused broadly on Dynamical Systems, Estimation and Control, spanning basic theory, computational methods, design, experimental methods, advanced prototypes, and collaboration with industry to develop flight experiments. Significant accomplishments have been documented in his papers (http://dnc.tamu.edu/drjunkins/Page1.html) and lie in the following areas: - Navigation, Guidance, and Control of Aerospace Vehicles - Dynamical Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization - Probabilistic Analysis and Optimization, Estimation Theory - Aeroelasticity and Fluid/Structure Interaction - Autonomous Intelligent Control of Robotic Systems - Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Real-Time Inference - Spacecraft Constellations and Formations - Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles - Cooperative Robotics - Design.

Recently he has focused on an important invention which promises to singificantly enhance real-time machine vision: Fusion of 4th generation LADAR, parallel computation and advanced computational vision algorithms, anticipating the realization of a six dimensional imaging high definition sensor (HD6D) that measures HD dense range vectors accurate to mm accuracy and simultaneously captures co-registered HD color image frames, resulting in overlapping (x, y, z, R, G, B) point clouds updated at video rates (15 million pixels/sec). Contiguous overlapping point clouds are fused in near-real-time using novel algorithms to obtain super-resolution six dimensional maps of extended objects, and also obtain relative navigation of the sensor to the mapped scene. HD6D hardware and software are being developed in collaboration with Systems Processes and Engineering Corporation (SPEC) of Austin, TX.

Junkins is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Member of the International Academy of Astronautics, an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a Fellow of several other relevant professional societies. His work has been recognized by over a dozen international honors. His former students and their technical offspring constitute four generations of PhD, MS and BS recipients; a significant school of thought in industry, government and academia, with pervasive impact on the field.

Doctoral students (graduated through August 2011)
Kraige, L. G.; Blanton, J. N.; Taylor, M.; Bird, D.; Hendricks; S. L.; Turner; J. D.; Rajan, M.; Vadali; S. R.; Carrington, C. K.; Rajaram, S.; Mook, D. J.; Lim, K. B.; Creamer, N. G.; Rew, D. W.; Thompson, R. C.; James, G. H.; Kim, Y. D.; Hecht, N. K.; Bang, H., Browder, A. M.; Lee, S.; Fharat, A., Hurtado, J. E., Gong, H., McVay, M., Schaub, H., Akella, M., Verma, A. J., Ju, G., Subbarao, K., Kim, Hye-Young, Yim, J. R., Samaan, M.; Du, J. Y.; Griffith, D. T.; Sinclair, A.; Singla, P., Katake, A.; Majii, M.; Davis, J.; Bai, X.; Henderson, T.; Ko, B.; Woodbury, D.; Bani Younes, A.

Personal/Family
Dr. Junkins married Nancy Elouise Click December 26, 1965, immediately following graduation from Auburn University. Following 4 yrs of graduate study at UCLA time-shared with R&D at McDonnell-Douglas Astronautics Company, John and Elouise moved to Virginia where John joined the faculty at the University of Virginia (1970-1978) then Virginia Tech (1978-1985). They moved to College Station, TX in 1985 when John joined the faculty at Texas A&M. They are parents to J. Stephen Junkins who is presently a software engineer with INTEL, Bend, OR and Beaverton, OR; and Kathryn L. Sarpong (Junkins), DVM, who is co-owner of Metro Paws Animal Hospital in Dallas, TX. John and Elouise have four grandchildren (Anna Junkins, Orion Junkins, Abigail Sarpong, and Elouise Sarpong). Dr. Junkins is a native of Dalton, GA, born May 23, 1943 to George M. and A. Lenelle Junkins, and he has four siblings [B. Faye Gibbons (Junkins), L. Jean Gagliano (Junkins), Jerry W. Junkins, and G. Michael Junkins].