Our Members

Dr. Petros Voulgaris

Before joining UNR in 2020 and since 1991, Professor Petros G. Voulgaris has been a faculty with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign holding also appointments with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are in the general area of robust and optimal control and coordination of autonomous systems. Dr. Voulgaris is a recipient of several awards including the NSF Research Initiation Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award and the UIUC Xerox Award for research. He has also been a Visiting ADGAS Chair Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE and a Visiting Gaungbiao Chair at Zhejiang University, China. His research has been supported by several agencies including NSF, ONR, AFOSR, NASA. He is also a Fellow of IEEE.

Antonio Fernández Castaño

Antonio currently works as a Graduate Research Assistant in the Learning Autonomy and Control Systems Lab at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Mathematics in 2022 from West Virginia University Institute of Technology. He was awarded the Presidential Leadership Award, Pi Tau Sigma Chapter Contribution, and National Fluid Power Association awards during his time there. During his pursuit of an MS at UNR, he actively contributed to two research papers: "Adaptive Control to Suppress Torque Ripple in Electric Vehicles" and "Uncertainty Quantification-Based Switching Control Method for Vision-Based Object Tracking in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles." Both papers were presented at MECC 2023 and AIAA SciTech 2024 respectively. His research interests include uncertainty mitigation in autonomous vehicles, manufacturing control and robotics, and machine learning. After the completion of his MS, he will be joining Tesla, Inc.

Caleb Patton

After completing his B.S. in Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, Caleb decided to come to broaden his skillset by working towards a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno in the LAACSL. Caleb's research interests revolve around autonomy, aerospace and robotics. In particular, this means developing HITL or SITL simulations to test control algorithms based on Computer Vision, and Deep Learning. Caleb is also interested in applying these techniques to UAV swarms and Hypersonic Vehicles, which he will do during an internship with the AutonomyNM program at Sandia National Labs during Summer 2024.

Jessica Peterson

Ms. Jessica Peterson is a part-time Instructor Flight Test Engineer for the USAF Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) and a current PhD student and Research Assistant for the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University Nevada Reno. She has over 18 years of flight test experience on fighter, bomber, and autonomous vehicles. As a graduate and instructor of USAF TPS, she has directed hundreds of control room missions, instructed 150+ flight test and space test professionals at USAF TPS, and flown in over 40 different aircraft types with over 500 military flight hours in primarily the T-38, F-16, and C-12 aircraft.

Ms. Peterson began her career as a DoD Civil Service employee in 2005 and attended US Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) as a civilian Flight Test Engineer in 2017. She has served in various engineering capacities including RQ-4 Guidance and Control Test Engineer, F-16 Flight Sciences Lead, Special Projects Flight Technology Lead, B-2 Flight Test Engineer, and USAF TPS Test Foundations Technical Expert. The highlight of her career was when she got to shake the hand of a pilot whose life was saved by a system she helped develop and test, the F-16 Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System.

Prior to returning to graduate school, Ms. Peterson was the Technical Director for the 412th Operations Group at Edwards Air Force Base, California. She provided technical oversight for the Air Force's largest Flight Test Operations Group, responsible for a $40M flight hour budget and developmental test and evaluation of over 300 test programs on 76 aircraft of 12 different types. Additionally, she was an Assistant Professor and Instructor Flight Test Engineer at USAF TPS, instructing the foundational elements to plan, conduct, and report on developmental test programs. She instructed a diverse range of topics in the classroom, laboratory, control room and in the airborne environment. In this position she was responsible for course development and instruction of 15 advanced engineering courses to 75+ test professional students annually.