Claire J. Tomlin

Claire J. Tomlin

Claire J. Tomlin

Awards

IEEE Transportation Technologies Award, IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal

Biography

Claire J. Tomlin’s control systems expertise is making air transportation systems safer through collision avoidance techniques and avionics safety verification methods. Tomlin’s algorithms allow the development and analysis of control protocols that have guarantees of safety for hybrid system models, which represent the kinds of switched dynamical systems found in air transportation systems. Her work has been tested in simulation, on unmanned aerial vehicle test flights, and flown on commercial platforms. She built one of the first quadrotor testbeds for experimentation with these control protocols. Her methods were used to compute collision zones for two aircraft paired approaches and were flown on a Boeing T-33 test aircraft that was able to avoid collision with an F-15 flying “blunders” into its path. Her work is also integral to the development of the Next Generation Air Transportation System for modernizing air traffic control.

An IEEE Fellow, Tomlin is the Charles A. Desoer Chair in Engineering (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.