Prior Experiences

Pat drew from his experiences as a helicopter pilot, an interest in developing autonomous vehicles – particularly an autonomous helicopter. This led Pat to develop real-time embedded control-systems.

First in the Automotive industry, where the development included both an on-vehicle battery charging and monitoring system, for GM’s electric vehicle, and an automatic braking system (ABS). During this period, Pat became impressed with functionally describing systems using data/control/signal flow diagramming and its associated decomposition, decoupling, and cohesion. The MathWorks product, Simulink, has captured this engineering market and Pat’s attention. The market previously included tools called Teamwork and MatrixX.

Pat developed real-time hardware-in-the-loop vehicle systems, including engine, transmission and ABS, using MATLAB, Simulink and RTW, auto-coding continuous-time based plant models, interfaced to discrete-time based controllers.

Next, Pat transitioned to the Aerospace industry, developing autonomous vehicle embedded control systems – missiles to be specific, including linear-actuator control, autopilot, and divert-attitude-control systems, for both embedded controller and plant models. During this time, Pat led a team to develop a hardware-in-the-loop system interface between a missile avionics section and a six-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) real-time simulation.

Pat now develops certifiable real-time embedded control systems/software, including modeling, simulation, analysis, auto-coding, and V&V, using MATLAB/ Simulink/ Stateflow, RTW, Embedded Coder, C/ C++, telecomputing from Tucson, AZ.