Our Leadership

Chief Technical Officer and Founder

Dr. Corban is Chief Technical Officer and founder of Guided Systems Technologies, Inc. (GST). Under his direction over the past 21 years, GST has performed innovative guidance and control research and development efforts for customers within the US Air Force, Army, and Navy, as well as leading airframe manufactures. Under his direction, GST has obtained patent protection for neural network-based adaptive control technology developed in partnership with Prof. Anthony Calise of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Corban led efforts to implement and flight test this technology on several unmanned helicopters for the U.S. Army. He has designed and developed a miniature avionics package for unmanned vehicles, and has performed numerous flight test programs jointly with Ga Tech to demonstrate a variety of controllers, including a very high bandwidth adaptive flight control system. He supported GST’s program, led by Prof. Calise, to develop an adaptive autopilot for the USAF/Boeing RESTORE effort. This program culminated in flight test of GST’s adaptive control system technology on the X-36, which was subsequently slated for use on the DARPA/Boeing Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle in a block upgrade.

Dr. Corban directed the application of this technology to several variants of the Joint Direct Attack Munition for the USAF Munitions Branch at Eglin in a program which has produced flight validation on the MK-84. Dr. Corban is currently the PI for directly related Navy and Air Force SBIRs that seek to demonstrate a passive image-based UAV obstacle avoidance system, and miniaturization of that system for micro air vehicle application, respectively. He was the PI for an AFOSR Phase II STTR that is focused on the development of real-time methods for UAV trajectory optimization over complex 3-D terrain in the presence of pop-up threats and obstacles. Dr. Corban was also responsible for contracted adaptive control system flight demonstration programs for both the US Army Agile Eagle, and the USAF Skytote UAVs, and for adaptive control system design for high altitude long endurance UAVs.

Prior to his graduate studies he was a member of the technical staff at McDonnell Douglas Helicopters and worked in the areas of rotorcraft acoustics and flight test. He holds a BS in physics from Millsaps College, and BS, MS and PhD degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a member of the AIAA, IEEE and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

Relevant Publications

“Reusable Launch Vehicle Adaptive Guidance and Control Using Neural Networks”, Johnson, E. N., Corban, J. E., and Calise, A. J., Proceedings of the 2001 AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference.

“Rapid Near-Optimal Trajectory Generation for Single-Stage-to-Orbit Airbreathing Vehicles,” J. E. Corban, A. J. Calise and G. A. Flandro, AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 1181-1190.

"Optimal Control of Singularly Perturbed Nonlinear Systems with State Inequality Constraints," A. J. Calise and J. E. Corban, AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control & Dynamics, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 468-476.

“Nondimensional Forms for Singular Perturbation Analyses of Aircraft Energy Climbs,” A. J. Calise, N. Markopoulos, and J. E. Corban, AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control & Dynamics, Vol 17, pp. 584-590,1994.

“Flight Test of an Adaptive Control System for Unmanned Helicopter Trajectory Following,” J. E. Corban, A. J. Calise and JVR Prasad, Presented at the AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference, August 2000.