Keith LeGrand
Purdue University
Seminar Information
Successful space domain awareness (SDA) requires maintaining track custody of cooperative and noncooperative xGEO space objects through both ballistic and maneuvering trajectories. The surveillance of cislunar space objects is particularly challenging due to their underlying chaotic multi-body dynamics, which makes future motion harder to predict compared to Keplerian orbits. This talk discusses recent advances in nonlinear and non-Gaussian state estimation with applications to tracking maneuvering objects in chaotic dynamical systems. Additionally, this talk discusses the search-while-tracking (SWT) problem and presents a generalized approach to information-driven sensor tasking. The proposed approach considers the impact of non-Gaussian kinematic uncertainty, unknown target existence, data association uncertainty, and target appearance/disappearance.
Keith LeGrand is an Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and director of the Sensing, Controls, and Probabilistic Estimation (SCOPE) group at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to that, he was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he conducted research in inertial navigation, space systems, and multi-object tracking. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology. He is the recipient of the International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF) Young Investigator Award and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program Award. His research interests include nonlinear estimation, multi-sensor multi-object tracking, and space domain awareness.