Don Sofge

Biography

Don Sofge is a Roboticist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) with 31 years of experience in Artificial Intelligence and Control Systems R&D. He leads the Distributed Autonomous Systems Group in the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence (NCARAI), where he develops nature-inspired computing paradigms to challenging problems in sensing, artificial intelligence, and control of autonomous robotic systems. His current research focuses on control of autonomous teams or swarms of robotic systems for Navy-relevant missions. He has served as PI on dozens of federally funded R&D programs and has more than 150 peer-reviewed publications on autonomy, intelligent control, quantum computing, and related topics. He has served as an advisor on autonomous systems to DARPA, ONR, OSD, ARL, NSF, and NASA, as well as US representative on international TTCP and NATO technical panels on autonomous systems, and has participated as a member of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program Interagency Working Groups: Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Systems (IRAS), Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (MLAI), and the AI R&D Ad Hoc Group. Don also occasionally serves as an Adjunct Faculty Member at the University of Maryland where teaches graduate-level courses in Robotics.