Aerotonomy’s core team consists of a number of highly talented and committed individuals, and an outstanding group of consultants and strategic business partnerships. The company’s current partners include government and military laboratories, research institutions, and major U.S. aerospace companies.
Dr. James Neidhoefer, CEO
Dr. James Neidhoefer is the CEO of Aerotonomy, Inc. Dr. Neidhoefer’s work in the development, integration, and flight testing of autonomous UAS guidance and control systems and image-aided navigation systems has won multiple awards and has been funded by NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and many private sector organizations. Some of this work has encompassed autonomous guidance algorithms for formation flying, Detect, Sense, and Avoid (DSA), and autonomous aggressive maneuvering. His recent work in navigation has focused on image-aided INS applications. He has also done considerable work on developing autonomous algorithms which respect the rules and regulations followed by manned aircraft as well as those recommended by the RTCA SC-203 (specific to UAS) to expedite certification for UAS integration into the National Airspace System.
Dr. Neidhoefer has recently been elected to the AIAA's Board of Directors and is AIAA's current Industry Expert on Intelligent Systems. He is an Associate Editor for the AIAA Journal of Aerospace Computing, Information, and Communication (JACIC) and he led the 2006 AIAA TAC
Leadership Workshop and the AIAA Technical Committee Chair training sessions at the 2005, 2006, and 2007 Aerospace Sciences
Meetings in Reno, NV. He served on the 2005-2006 Guidance, Navigation, Control, Dynamics, & Avionics panel
of the National Research Council's Decadal Survey on Civil Aeronautics to provide guidance to NASA on restructuring their
aeronautics research budget. He also represented the U.S. at a NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) in 1996 and received the Best
Paper Award at the 1994 Artificial Neural Networks in Engineering (ANNIE), international technical conference.
Dr. Neidhoefer is a member of Penn State University’s Industrial and Professional Advisory Council (IPAC), has developed and taught courses in advanced flight dynamics and controls, has over 30 intelligent-systems related publications and holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Alabama.
