Dr. Zahra Nili Ahmadabadi has received two Awards from the Army Research Office and the ONR Science of Autonomy program

Dr. Zahra Nili Ahmadabadi has received an Early Career Award of $990, 000.00 from the Army Research Office. This project formulates continuous-time control frameworks for sensorimotor exploration of uncertain environments and steering ground robot(s) to sound sources of interest in an a priori unknown and highly non-convex signal fields. The study will lead to fundamental advancements in newton-based extremum seeking approaches and enable their real-world applications in challenging conditions that require localization of signal sources. Examples of applications include identifying abnormal equipment sounds in cluttered industrial settings for predictive maintenance, tracking and studying marine animals using their acoustic signatures, and locating signals from disaster victims in search and rescue operations.

Dr. Zahra Nili Ahmadabadi has recieved another award of $519, 815.00 from the ONR Science of Autonomy program. This project establishes theoretical and practical model-free control systems for unmanned vehicles to enable seeking the sources of sound signals in uncertain dynamic maritime environments where measured signals are distorted, diverted, or diffused by environmental factors. The project will advance control theory and applications by establishing methods that incorporate a broad range of adaptive and accelerated gradient optimization techniques.