Directions to BYU
Magicc Lab

Helps for Students

Controls Curriculum

Randal W. Beard received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in 1991, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1993, the M.S. degree in mathematics in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1995, all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.  Since 1996, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, where he is currently a professor.  In 1997 and 1998, he was a Summer Faculty Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. In 2006-2007 he was a research associate at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Munitions Directorate, Eglin AFB, FL.

His primary research focus is autonomous control of micro unmanned air vehicles and multiple vehicle coordination and control.  He is a senior member of the IEEE, a senior member of AIAA, and is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Control Systems Magazine and for the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems. In 1998 and 2004 he was voted the outstanding teacher in the BYU Electrical and Computer Engineering Department by graduating seniors, and in 2002 he received the Outstanding Professor award from the BYU Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.  In 2004 he received the Young Scholar award from Brigham Young University, and in 2006 he received the Technology Transfer award from Brigham Young University.

First International Symposium on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV'08).

Publication preprints are available upon request.

New Textbook: Wei Ren, Randal W. Beard, Distributed Consensus in Multi-Vehicle Cooperative Control,  Communication and Control Engineering Series, Springer Verlag, New York, 2007, ISBN: 978-1-84800-014-8.