Daniel PackUnmanned military aircraft that can think for themselves - robot drones - are a speciality of Daniel Pack, Ph.D., the newly appointed Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
He has an experimental fleet of 10 plane-line drones and 17 quad-rotor drones.
One of Pack's fixed-wing drones in flight.Pack also has experimented with drones a soldier could control on the battlefield using brain-wave sensors inside his helmet.
UTC Chancellor Steven Angle announced Pack's appointment on Tuesday.
"We are fortunate to have a teacher, researcher and scholar of Dr. Pack's caliber join us at UTC. His decision to lead our Engineering and Computer Science College demonstrates our outstanding achievements and the potential for future growth and community impact," Angle said in a statement.
Pack currently works at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he's the Mary Lou Clarke Professor and Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has led a department of 32 faculty members with 850 students and managed a $6 million budget plus a research enterprise of more than $3 million annually.
Pack was Founding Director of the Academy Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Research at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
He has earned more than $1 million annually in research funding on cooperative multiple unmanned air vehicles projects from government and industry partners. He has also published over 130 journal and conference papers. His areas of research include sensor-based intelligent control, cooperative unmanned aerial systems, robotics, embedded systems, and computer security.
Read more in tomorrow's Times Free Press.