Professor Lucy Pao of the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Colorado at Boulder has received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award for research that may have applications in air traffic control, robotics and several other fields.
Professor Pao will receive $300,000 over a three-year period, plus an additional $17,500 for equipment to conduct research in tracking and surveillance systems. Besides its primary research goals of developing new state-of the art algorithms for naval and commercial applications, the grant will be used to support graduate students in their dissertations to prepare them for industrial or academic research positions, Pao said.
The award will enable Pao and her graduate students to develop multisensor fusion algorithms for tracking multiple objects that have applications in air traffic control, tactical air defense, robotics, computer vision and other systems where measurements from multiple sensors are used to estimate the positions and velocities of multiple objects.
Id like to see these algorithms make it into real systems down the line, Pao said.
Paos proposal was titled, Distributed Multisensor Fusion Algorithms for Tracking Applications. Research results will provide insight into the relative performance of various distributed fusion methods, and also will provide a basis for assessing the tradeoffs between computational and communication requirements when planning new sensor network architectures or communication link methods.
The awards were given to academic researchers who received their doctorates on or after Dec. 1, 1991. This year ONR received proposals from 300 academic researchers, and Pao was one of 29 selected to receive the award.
Pao received her doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992. She worked for the MITRE Corp. and was a professor at Northwestern University before joining the faculty at CU-Boulder in 1995.