Each - Draper Laboratory

As Draper’s new president, it is my
pleasure to introduce this year’s
edition of The Draper Technology
Digest. An important element of our
strategy is to focus on a limited set of critical
technical capabilities and to maintain our skills
in these areas at a world-class level. These capabilities
are:
• Guidance, navigation, and control.
• Autonomous air, land, sea, and space
systems.
• Reliable, fault-tolerant embedded systems.
• Miniature, low-power electronic and
mechanical systems.
• Large-scale networked systems integration.
• Biomedical engineering.
In each of these areas, we strive to be recognized
as technology leaders through innovative application
of technology to solve sponsors’ problems.
Technology leadership also requires that
our staff share their accomplishments with the
broader community by publishing, presenting
at conferences, and serving on advisory boards
and panels.
2 Letter from the President and CEO, James D. Shields
James D. Shields,
President and CEO
The Digest supports our efforts to encourage
publishing by recognizing the authors of the best
papers that were produced in the previous year.
It also provides a forum to consolidate in a single
volume a sampling of the technical accomplishments
across the range of our critical capabilities.
The six papers this year cover topics in guidance,
navigation and control, microelectromechanical
systems (MEMS), and biomedical engineering.
All were either published in a refereed journal or
presented at a prestigious technical conference.
Each year, during National Engineers Week, Eli
Gai, our Vice President of Engineering, presents
an award to the authors of the best technical
paper published in the prior calendar year.
Eli also gives awards recognizing the best patent,
the most effective task leader, and an outstanding
mentor to students who work at the Laboratory.
I congratulate the winners of these awards, whose
accomplishments are described in this issue.
Draper’s commitment to advanced technical education
through the Draper Fellows program, where
Masters and PhD candidates are supported financially
and academically by allowing them to do their
thesis research on a Draper project, continued for
the 34 th consecutive year. We recognize this year’s
graduates by listing them and their thesis titles.