Staff Page - David Musliner

1988 B.S.E. Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton NJ.
1993 Ph.D. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI.

During more than fourteen years of leadership in intelligent systems research, Dr. Musliner has developed extensive experience with planning and control for autonomous systems, including space, air, and ground vehicles.

For example, in collaboration with other current SIFT researchers (Michael Pelican and Eric Engstrom), Dr. Musliner led the development of the planning and control software for the DARPA-funded Heterogeneous Unmanned Reconnaissance Team (HURT) project. For HURT, up to six small UAVs were flown fully autonomously and sent specialized RSTA imagery directly to ground soldiers, at their request. The HURT team spent many weeks in field testing with Marine infantry, conducting live-flight exercises in urban operations using the UAVs and soldier-carried RSTA display systems. In the latest demonstration, HURT coordinated an even wider range of assets including a manned C-12 aircraft flying at 6000 feet, unmanned Hunter, Shadow, and ScanEagle vehicles flying at 2000 feet, and smaller Pointer, Raven, and Wasp vehicles flying as low as 100 feet over the combat zone.

Dr. Musliner also designed and developed a distributed airspace management system for NASA’s AATT advanced air traffic technology program, demonstrating the value of Contract-Net based approaches to air route planning. In earlier work, Dr. Musliner led the development of Playbook-based planning and control software for commanding teams of small indoor robots, providing ISR imagery and security in support of urban small combat unit operations during the Tactical Mobile Robots program. Dr. Musliner also led a DARPA-funded Coordinators project developing distributed task coordination software to help optimize human teams in the performance of dynamic, inter-dependent tasks such as combat operations or searchand- rescue.

For his Ph.D. dissertation, Dr. Musliner designed and implemented the Cooperative Intelligent Real- Time Control Architecture (CIRCA), one of the first AI planning and control architectures capable of reasoning about and interacting with dynamic, hard real-time domains. CIRCA is designed to make rigorous safety guarantees about its plans, using formal verification methods to ensure that its plans avoid predicted failures while also achieving system goals.

During more than 13 years at Honeywell’s corporate research center, Dr. Musliner led several research thrusts in the areas of intelligent real-time control and autonomous systems, with numerous DARPA- and NASA-funded projects based on CIRCA and other technologies. Dr. Musliner also led projects on reasoning under uncertainty to allow autonomous decision-making and adversarial reasoning in cyber war applications. Over the past several years, most of the involved Honeywell researchers have transitioned, with Dr. Musliner, to work for SIFT, LLC.

Dr. Musliner has published extensively in journals and conferences including AI Journal, IEEE Computer, IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, AAAI, and numerous symposia and workshops. Dr. Musliner participates on program committees and review boards for NASA, DARPA ISAT, IEEE, AAAI, and NSF.