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Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering
Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Randy Beard

Professor and Department Chair
Curriculum Vitae
Faculty
Website: Randy Beard
Email: beard@byu.edu

Office: 460B EB

Phone: 422-8392

Biography

Randal W. Beard received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in 1991, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1993, the M.S. degree in mathematics in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1995, all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y. Since 1996, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, where he is currently holds the Steven V. White University Professorship and is the department chair. In 1997 and 1998, he was a Summer Faculty Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. In 2006-2007 he was a National Research Council Fellow at the Air Force Research Labs at Eglin Air Force Base, Fort Walton Beach, Florida, where he worked on vision-based guidance and control algorithms for micro air vehicles.

His primary research focus is autonomous systems, unmanned air vehicles, and multiple vehicle coordination and control. He has published over 250 peer reviewed articles and has received over $15M in external research funding from AFOSR, AFRL, NASA, DARPA, and NSF. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the AIAA. He is a former associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the Journal of Intelligent and Robotics Systems, and the IEEE Control Systems Magazine. He is the recipient of several awards including the 2024 AIAA Intelligent Systems Award and the 2017 Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Lecturer Award. His students have won numerous competitions and awards for their work on micro air vehicles.

Publications

  • Mark E. Petersen, Randal W. Beard, “Tracking Multiple Unmanned Air Systems on SE(3) Using a Monocular Camera,” IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, (in review).
  • Mark E. Petersen, Randal W. Beard, “The Integrated Probabilistic Data Association Filter Adapted to Lie Groups,” IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, (in review).
  • Puneet Jain, Cameron K. Peterson, Randal W. Beard, “Encirclement of Moving Targets using Noisy Range and Bearing Measurements,” AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, (to appear).
  • Jacob Johnson, Randal W. Beard, “Globally-Attractive Logarithmic Geometric Control of a Quadrotor for Aggressive Trajectory Tracking,” IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS), vol. 6, p. 2216-2221, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9672147, 2022.
  • Jared J. Moore, Craig C. Bidstrup, Cameron K. Peterson, Randal W. Beard, “Tracking Multiple Vehicles Constrained to a Road Network from a UAV with Sparse Visual Measurements,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI, vol. 8, Article 744185, https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.744185, October, 2021.
  • Jacob B. Willis, Randal W. Beard, “Pitch and Thrust Allocation for Full-Flight-Regime Control of Winged eVTOL UAVs,” IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS), vol. 6, p. 1058-1063, DOI: 10.1109/LCSYS.2021.3089130, 2021.
  • Mark Petersen, Chad Samuelson, Randal W. Beard, “Target Tracking and Following from a Multirotor UAV,” Current Robotics Reports, Springer, (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43154-021-00060-7, https://rdcu.be/cnV5I), p. 1-11, 2021.
  • Daniel P. Koch, David O. Wheeler, Randal W. Beard, Timothy W. McLain, Kevin M. Brink, “Relative Multiplicative Extended Kalman Filter for Observable GPS-Denied Navigation,” International Journal of Robotics Research, vol 39, no 9, p. 1085-1121, 2020.
  • Jacob H. White, Randal W. Beard, “An Iterative Pose Estimation Algorithm based on Epipolar Geometry with Application to Multi-Target Tracking,” IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, vol 7, no 4, p.942-953, 2020.
  • Danial P. Koch, David O. Wheeler, James S. Jackson, Gary J. Ellingson, Paul W. Nyholm, Timothy W. McLain, Randal W. Beard, “Relative Navigation of Autonomous GPS-Degraded Micro Air Vehicles,” Autonomous Robots http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10514-019-09899-4, 2020.
  • Parker C. Lusk, Patricia C. Glaab, Louis J. Glaab, Randal W. Beard, “Safe2Ditch: Emergency Landing for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems,” AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems, vol. 16, no. 8, https://doi.org/10.2514/1.I010706, July, 2019.
  • He Bai, Randal W. Beard, “Relative Heading Estimation and its Application to Target Handoff in GPS-Denied Environments,” IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, vol. 27, no. 1, p. 74-85, 2019.
  • Bai, He, & Beard, Randal Winston. (January (1st Quarter/Winter) 2019). Relative Heading Estimation and its Application to Target Handoff in GPS-Denied Environments. Journal Article, Academic Journal. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, . 27 (1)
  • Ferrin, Jeffrey, Beard, Randal Winston, & McLain, Timothy Wayne. (No date available). Estimation-aware model predictive control of a ground robot. Journal Article, Academic Journal. Transactions on Robotics, IEEE.
  • Jackson, James, Nielsen, Jarel, McLain, Timothy Wayne, & Beard, Randal Winston. (No date available). Improving the robustness of visual-inertial extended Kalman filtering. Conference Proceedings. International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE.
  • Sahawneh, Laith R., Wikle, Jared K., Roberts, Adam K., Spencer, Jonathan C., McLain, Timothy Wayne, Beard, Randal Winston, & Warnick, Karl Foster. (August 2018). A ground-based sense-and-avoid system for small unmanned aircraft. Journal Article, Academic Journal. Journal of Aerospace Information Systems, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. 15 (8) , 501-517. doi:10.2514/1.I010627
  • Wheeler, David O, Koch, Daniel P, Jackson, James S, McLain, Timothy Wayne, & Beard, Randal Winston. (August 2018). Relative Navigation: A keyframe-based approach for observable GPS-degraded navigation. Journal Article, Academic Journal. Control Systems, IEEE. doi:10.1109/MCS.2018.28300