Alec J. Bateman
Principal Research Scientist

Mr. Bateman received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1997. He joined Barron Associates in 1997, and received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia while continuing to work for Barron Associates. His Masters research was on stability analysis and control design techniques for systems with actuator saturation. The results of this research were incorporated into RASCLE, a software tool funded by NASA Langley Research Center to automate the assessment of control law stability.

While at Barron Associates, Mr. Bateman has been involved in several projects to develop optimal guidance systems for autonomous munitions. He has worked on developing systems to improve pilot interfaces in rotary and fixed wing aircraft, and on a program to develop adaptive reconfigurable controls algorithms that can be retrofitted to the production control systems of an F/A-18. Flight tests of this technology are planned for 2005. He has also been involved in development of a commercial MATLAB software tool to aid in updating aerodynamic simulation databases with experimental (flight-test) data, and in development of a device to protect security critical software from piracy. He recently serrved as principal investigator for a program to develop control design approaches for underwater vehicles that utilize a potentially large suite of control effectors with differing bandwidths.

Mr. Bateman has been involved in a number of research efforts related to verification and validation of advanced flight control laws, beginning with the previously mentioned effort that led to the RASCLE software tool. Currently, he is serving as the principal investigator for a NASA funded research effort focused on developing tools for automated test vector generation to aid in off-line testing of control algorithms. He is also involved in an Air Force funded program to develop run-time verification and validation approaches for safety critical flight control systems. These approaches would provide a means of safely using algorithms that provide enhanced capabilities but for which traditional off-line V\&V is inadequate. This program has recently entered Phase II and is expected to culminate in hardware-in-the-loop testing of a system that monitors adaptive and learning elements in a control law and selectively disables components in the unlikely event of an algorithm fault.

View Publications