Peter Z. Schulte, Ph.D. AE '18

The doctoral research of Peter Z. Schulte, Ph.D. AE '18, has been recognized by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), which awarded the recent Daniel Guggenheim grad the Luigi G. Napolitano Award during ceremonies held in Bremen, Germany on October 5.

The Luigi G. Napolitano Award is presented annually by IAF's Space Education and Outreach Committee to a young scientist, below 30 years of age, who has contributed significantly to the advancement of aerospace science and has given a paper at the International Astronautical Congress on that contribution.

As a recipient of the 2017 Future Space Leaders Foundation grant, Schulte was asked to present his research “On-Board Model-Based Fault Diagnosis for Autonomous Proximity Operations” before the IAC last fall. Since graduating this past June, Schulte has taken a position as a guidance navigation and control engineer with Draper, in Houston, Texas.

Schulte's research explores the efficacy of the state machine fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) system that can be used to identify and address mission-critical failures in aerospace vehicles. His study advances the state-of-the-art in state machine fault protection by developing an on-board diagnostic system that will assess symptoms, isolate fault sources, and select corrective actions based on models of system behavior.

"This approach has been successfully shown to detect, diagnose, and respond to faults during testing," he said. "State machines allow the autonomous system to handle distinct faults with identical symptoms for initial detection. Each fault has a separate diagnosis and response procedure, and the proper procedure is selected by the state machine. This study demonstrates how a fault protection system may diagnose these faults on-board rather than relying upon a priori ground diagnosis."

Schulte's doctoral advisor at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering was Prof. Dave Spencer.

Schulte, second from the left, is seen here after receiving the Napolitano Medal during the IAF's award ceremony, October 5.