Ilya Kolmanovsky Awarded the AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award at AIAA’s Annual SciTech Exposition

Congratulations to Professor Ilya Kolmanovsky, the Pierre T. Kabamba Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, on being awarded the Mechanics and Control of Flight Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the highest honor given by the AIAA for the mechanics and control of flight. Professor Kolmanovsky is being presented the award for, “His significant contributions to advances in theory and methods enabling development of reference governors and model predictive control algorithms enforcing safety constraints in aerospace systems.”

Kolmanovsky has focused his recent research on control theory and has been advancing methods for protecting systems from violating safety constraints during their operation. In particular, he has been focusing on Model Predictive Control (MPC) which utilizes onboard constrained trajectory optimization to optimally maneuver vehicles. His research has involved developing MPC formulations with guaranteed closed loop properties that are effective in aerospace and automotive applications, on novel numerical algorithms for fast and reliable onboard optimization, and on supervisory schemes (called computational governors, stability governors and feasibility governors) which assist onboard optimizers in reliably and quickly finding solutions.

By utilizing these methods, Professor Kolmanovsky has been able to address challenges and develop new capabilities for safe spacecraft autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, for spacecraft attitude control and for prolonging spacecraft orbital missions. He has also been developing solutions for maneuver and gust load alleviation to enable efficiency improvements of air transportation and for high-altitude long endurance missions, and for constrained coordinated and distributed control of gas turbine engine and electrical power system in a more electric aircraft. Recognizing a significant potential of MPC for aerospace applications, Professor Kolmanovsky has made advances to address the bottleneck in the use of MPC which relates to the computations involved in onboard optimization and enable substantial reductions in the computational footprint of MPC solutions. Kolmanovsky has also made significant contributions to the development of reference/command governors and to demonstrating their potential for aerospace applications. These schemes can be augmented to nominal controllers in order to modify reference commands to avoid safety constraint violations.

“I am truly honored to be the recipient of the 2025 AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award that holds a very special meaning to me. I would like to express my deep gratitude to the AIAA, and I am indebted to my mentors, colleagues, students, and collaborators for their support, collaboration, guidance and for making a very positive different in my academic and professional endeavors,” commented Kolmanovsky.

The prestigious Mechanics and Control of Flight Award, established in 1967, is proudly sponsored by the AIAA Astrodynamics, Atmospheric Flight Mechanics, and Guidance, Navigation, and Control Technical Committees and will be presented at the 2025 AIAA SciTech conference taking place January 6-10.