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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Mr. Robert N. Schmidt

Dr. Robert N. Schmidt has been chosen for the National Aviation and Space Exploration Wall of Honor due to his contributions to the exploration of space and advancements and inventions of improved aircraft control. Dr. Schmidt was the Program Director of the Zero-Gravity Shower and the Personal Hygiene Assembly for the Space Station Freedom. He developed water reprocessing techniques and assisted with the implementation of the urine reprocessing system for the Space Station. Dr. Schmidt coordinated space flight experiments for the NASA Center on Materials for Space Structures at Case Western Reserve University. His work lead to the use of new improved materials for structures located in space. As the founder and president of Orbital Research Inc., Dr. Schmidt was an inventor of the Fluid Flow Control Devices (US Patent 5,755,408) and Deployable Flow Control Device (US Patent 6,105,904), both microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices for controlling boundary layer flow on air/water vehicles. He was also an inventor of the Extended Horizon Adaptive block Predictive Controller with an Efficient Prediction System (US Patent 5,424,942), an algorithm used to
control flutter on aircraft. He fostered Orbital Research in the creation of algorithms for biologically inspired neural networks for flight control, genetic algorithms for path planning, and flocking and swarming algorithms for air/space vehicle group behavior.