Staff
| D. Richard Blidberg | Director |
| Steven Chappell | Software Systems Engineer |
| Regan Gentner | Office Manager |
| George Howard Burrows | Senior Researcher |
| Arthur C. Sanderson | Visiting Research Scholar |
| Robert H. Welsh | Adjunct Senior Researcher |
Dick received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in 1972. He co-founded the Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory (MSEL) at UNH in 1976. In 1993 the laboratory moved from UNH to Northeastern University where he served as Director of MSEL. He is currently the Director of the Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute (AUSI) in Lee, NH, which he founded in 1993.
Prior to MSEL, he managed the Seabed Survey operations at Ocean Research Equipment Inc., Falmouth MA; served with the United States Coast Guard, and worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He has written several papers and reports on unmanned untethered submersible technology, as well as organized fifteen international symposia on AUV technology. He has over 60 publications related to AUV technology and served on several science and engineering committees, consulted for a number of companies, and been involved in several international collaborations. He is currently the associate editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering for underwater vehicle systems.
His present interests are focused on the development of technologies related to autonomous submersible vehicles and include the investigation of architectures for intelligent guidance and control of multiple autonomous vehicles, applied acoustic navigation, underwater robotics, and biologically-based solutions to vehicle system design.
Steve earned his B.S. degree in Botany at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Durham in 1978. He earned a M.S. in Computer Science at UNH in 1987. His thesis was to design and implement a prototype mission planner for an autonomous vehicle based on a dual blackboard architecture.
Since joining MSEL (now AUSI) in 1981, he has been designing, implementing, and maintaining software for AUSI's experimental autonomous vehicles which serve as operational test beds for AUV research and development. During that time, he has been the design and implementation lead for two vehicle software architectures which have seen many hours of field use.
He is currently designing and implementing the Solar AUV top level architecture. His interests include autonomous systems, behavior based techniques, artificial intelligence programming techniques applied to real world problems, systems programming, distributed systems, evolutionary computation, and complexity. He has authored eight papers and co-authored 25 papers which have been published in conference proceedings, journals, and trade magazines.
Regan received her B.A in psychology from North Adams State College, North Adams, MA in 1995. She is currently the Office Manager for AUSI where she is responsible for the day to day administrative operations and management of the institute. Howard brings expertise in remote sensing, online communications, and digital libraries. He returns to AUSI from Raytheon where he worked with teams from IBM and Johns Hopkins to apply NASA remote sensing data to agriculture and public health.
His research concerns mechanisms for coordinated activity, which he has pursued from the cellular level (synapse formation) to the corporate level (bank mergers and interdisciplinary science libraries). Howard will apply artificial, natural, and social intelligence to interpret results from remote sensing of Earth, space, and brain systems.
