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Randy Beard

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Overview

Randy Beard

Randal W. Beard is the Steven V. White University Professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University. His work focuses on guidance, navigation, and control for autonomous aircraft and multi-vehicle systems, with an emphasis on algorithms that can be implemented and validated on real robotic platforms.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE and AIAA. His recognitions include the 2024 AIAA Intelligent Systems Award, the BYU Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award, and the BYU Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts Award. He has authored or coauthored four books, including Small Unmanned Aircraft: Theory and Practice, and his publication record includes 100 journal articles and book chapters and 189 peer-reviewed conference papers. His Google Scholar profile reports an h-index of 64 and more than 43,000 citations.

Much of this work has been carried out with students and colleagues in the BYU MAGICC Lab, where theory is developed alongside flight testing and experimental validation. Student teams he has advised have received awards in international micro-air-vehicle competitions and professional conferences.

Curriculum Vitae    GitHub

Contact

  • Email: beard (at) byu (dot) edu
  • Phone: (801) 422-8392
  • Office: 460B Engineering Building
  • Office hours: TTh, 4:00–5:00 p.m.

Education

  • Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1995
  • M.S., Mathematics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1994
  • M.S., Electrical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1993
  • B.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Utah, magna cum laude, 1991

Research

Research Areas

  • Autonomous aircraft Guidance, path planning, trajectory generation, flight control, and embedded autonomy for fixed-wing, multirotor, and eVTOL aircraft. This work has included development of lightweight autopilots and experimental aircraft testbeds with thousands of hours of flight testing.
  • Navigation and estimation State estimation in GNSS-degraded environments, visual-inertial navigation, continuous-time trajectory estimation, sensor calibration, target tracking, and estimation on matrix Lie groups.
  • Multi-vehicle systems Coordination and control of teams of autonomous vehicles, including consensus, cooperative timing, formation control, distributed estimation, surveillance, and target tracking.
  • Nonlinear control Constructive nonlinear and optimal control, including Galerkin approximations to Hamilton–Jacobi equations, geometric control, constrained path following, and control allocation.

Labs and Organizations

Selected Contributions

  • Practical guidance and control methods for small unmanned aircraft, supported by extensive hardware-in-the-loop and flight-test validation.
  • Foundational work in consensus and cooperative control for networked multi-agent systems.
  • Navigation and tracking methods for aerial robots operating with limited, degraded, or indirect measurements.
  • Open instructional resources that connect control theory with complete engineering design studies.

Publications

Google Scholar

Books

  • Randal W. Beard, Timothy W. McLain, Marc Killpack, and Cameron Peterson, Introduction to Feedback Control Using Design Studies. Book site and open materials | PDF | Publisher
  • Randal W. Beard and Timothy W. McLain, Small Unmanned Aircraft: Theory and Practice. Princeton University Press, 2012. Publisher | Book resources
  • Wei Ren and Randal W. Beard, Distributed Consensus in Multi-Vehicle Cooperative Control. Springer, 2008. Publisher
  • Kimon P. Valavanis, Paul Oh, Leslie Piegl, Hyunchul Shim, Randal W. Beard, and Anibal Ollero, eds., Selected Papers from the 2nd International Symposium on UAVs. Springer, 2010. Publisher

Selected Articles

Teaching

Professor Beard teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in feedback control, autonomous aircraft, linear and nonlinear systems, robotics, and signals and systems. His teaching emphasizes the connection between mathematical analysis, engineering design, simulation, and experimental validation.

Selected Courses

  • ECEn 240/301: Introduction to Circuits and Electronics
  • ECEn 380: Signals and Systems
  • ECEn 483: Introduction to Feedback Control
  • ECEn 536: Autonomous Aircraft Guidance, Navigation, and Control
  • ECEn 671: Mathematics of Signals and Systems
  • ECEn 773: Linear Systems Theory
  • ECEn 774: Nonlinear Systems Theory

Service

Selected Service

  • Chair, BYU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2024–present
  • General Chair, American Control Conference, 2026
  • Chair, IEEE Technical Committee on Aerospace Controls, 2011–2016
  • General Co-Chair, International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, 2012
  • Former associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, and the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems

Honors

Selected Honors

  • Steven V. White University Professorship, 2019–present
  • AIAA Intelligent Systems Award, 2024
  • Fellow, AIAA, 2021
  • Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award, BYU, 2017
  • Fellow, IEEE, 2015
  • Cozzins Teaching and Learning Fellowship, BYU, 2012-2015
  • Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts Award, BYU, 2009
  • Technology Transfer Award, BYU, 2006
  • Young Scholar Award, BYU, 2004