George J. Eppright Chair Professor
of Aerospace Engineering
Texas A&M University

 

Research and Expertise


Research Interests and Areas of Expertise:

  • Astronautics, navigation, and guidance
  • Dynamics, stability, and control
  • Analytical and numerical methods
  • Electro-optical sensor design and signal processing
  • Stereo sensing, vision systems, and pattern recognition
  • Robotic systems
While serving on University faculties, Professor Junkins has been Principal Investigator on over 50 externally funded projects with a budget of about $9M. His work is/has been funded by NSF, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, ARO, Sandia National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, several DOD agencies and private industries. He is the Director of the Center for Mechanics and Control, in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. The Center has over 40 currently enrolled MS and PhD students, 3 post doctoral researchers, and 8 faculty principal investigators. Junkins' work has directly supported over a dozen successful implementations in space missions over the last 30 years. Some historical highlights of his work:
  • Laser altimeter experiment for Apollo missions 15-17, developed a precise model for the shape of the moon.
  • Trajectory optimization for Delta booster missions, an early application of gradient/steepest desent theory/ algorithms to a practical problem.
  • Minimum-time maneuvers of spinning spacecraft using the earth's magnetic field. This approach was adopted successfully for several spacecraft, starting with the 1981 NOVA spacecraft.
  • Development of optimal control theory formulations for large angle spacecraft attitude maneuvers using reaction wheels. This work has indirectly impacted several applications including the 1994 Clementine attitude maneuver strategy.
  • Novel spacecraft attitude determination using star sensing and star pattern recognition, adopted on numerous DOD and NASA spacecraft. This work has been extended and adopted on several recent spacecraft, including Clementine (1994), NEAR (1996-), STS 107 StarNav experiment (June 2001), and EO-3 (CIRCA 2003).
  • Mapping the earth's terrain and gravity field from space observations, co-developed (with J. R. Jancaitis) SAPMAP, an early automated mapping system.
  • Developed the first finite element representation of the earth's gravity anomalies. This work supported early inertial guidance methods for Polaris missiles, and established the utility of a significant general-purpose method (based on ideas introduced by Junkins, Jancaitis, and Miller) for piecewise continuous approximation in n-dimensional spaces.

His recent work has been focused upon dynamical modeling, stability theory, navigation/guidance/control of aerospace vehicles, and adaptive control formulations for multibody systems, including analytical, computational, and experimental research. He has recently initiated research on modeling and adaptive control of Un-piloted Aerial Vehicles. His work has also impacted non-aerospace applications such as early work on dynamic modeling/vibration control for uranium gas centrifuges and recent invention of a patented method for large area digitization via laser scanning; this system has been adopted by General Motors and was the basis for the formation and start-up of Digital Scanning System, Inc., of Santa Rosa, CA, in 1992. He has submitted a patent disclosure on an analog vision sensor (VisNav) with numerous applications in robotics, navigation, multimedia, and machine vision. He has also submitted a recent patent disclosure on a split field of view star camera (StarNav) which embodies a real-time star pattern recognition process for autonomous spacecraft navigation applications; this technology has been licensed for commercialization by Jackson and Tull, incorporated, and is under development for the EO-3 GIFTS mission (2003).

VISION: Texas A&M Foundation 2000 Annual Report

Active Research Projects: Currently, he is pursuing several research projects, these can be overviewed by clicking here: Current Projects

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