Joseph (Joey) Schwalb
Senior AI Engineer at Camgian.
Huntsville, AL
Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UAH, expected Fall 2027. Before Camgian I built robotics software, simulation and machine learning infrastructure. With my team, I automated software deployment for a search-and-rescue drone fleet in disconnected environments. I helped fly our first autonomous flight on visual-inertial odometry from the ground station, and built the GPU clusters behind reinforcement-learning control studies.
- M.S. Computer Science2023
- B.S. Aeronautics2020
- Graduate Certificate, Cybersecurity2020
Experience
Camgian
2026 to present
Senior AI Engineer.
University of Alabama in Huntsville 2021 to 2026 Autonomous Systems Engineer, 2024 to 2026. Graduate Research Assistant, 2021 to 2023.
- Took part in flight operations from the ground station, deploying and monitoring the stack, for an experimental SAPIENCE research flight in July 2026: PX4 on a Pixhawk 6X with a Jetson Orin Nano on board, VIO as the only odometry source, and GPS logged for ground truth.
- For the NATO SPS-funded SAPIENCE effort, built the software factory: CI/CD pipelines, incremental container builds and Gazebo simulation tests, so a six-person student team could repeat the work. Worked on SBOM and SLSA provenance generation, which didn’t make the final product.
- Automated fleet deployment: a CLI installed K3s and joined drones over a mesh network, and one Helm chart gave each drone its pod. The control plane copied images while connected; in the field, K3s’s registry mirrors sent pulls to Spegel, which served those images over the local network.
- Ran 25+ drones in PX4 SITL on consumer desktop hardware with K3s for multi-vehicle autonomy testing, and deployed three real aircraft with the same tooling.
- Built distributed simulation support for autonomous-systems testing and documented microservice APIs with documentation-as-code practices.
- Developed a Unity search-and-rescue environment with variable terrain, obstacles and interactive mission conditions, a research platform used in 100+ experiments.
- Integrated onboard compute, robotics middleware, software-defined radios and motor control into a mobile robotics platform for GPS-denied navigation research.
More: my SAPIENCE contributions and project coverage, the flight, fleet deployment, simulation.
Radiance Technologies 2023 to 2026 Machine Learning Research Scientist, 2024 to 2026. Modeling and Simulation Engineer, 2023 to 2024.
- Developed cloud-enabled microservices for modeling and simulation platforms.
- Defined requirements, developed system diagrams and coordinated cross-team work for chat-enabled modeling and simulation workflows.
- Developed online reinforcement-learning methods for control studies in AFSIM, and validated system behavior with classical machine learning and analytics.
- Built GPU-enabled training clusters and repeatable machine learning pipelines with Ray, MLflow, Docker and GitLab for reinforcement-learning efforts.
Collins Aerospace 2019 to 2020 Summer Software Engineering Intern, Cedar Rapids, IA.
- Developed flight-data-recorder tooling and certification test cases for Bombardier avionics programs.
University of North Dakota 2017 to 2019 Undergraduate Research Assistant, Grand Forks, ND.
- Developed UAV swarm platforms, onboard and cloud workflows, and flight logic that demonstrated coordinated swarm behavior during test flights.
Education
- Ph.D., Computer Science
- University of Alabama in Huntsville, 2024 to present. Expected Fall 2027.
- M.S., Computer Science, Data Science concentration
- University of Alabama in Huntsville, 2023. Thesis: A Study of Explainable Real-Time Object Detection and Human-AI Teaming Interactions in Virtual Environments.
- Graduate Certificate, Cybersecurity
- Harvard Extension School, 2020.
- B.S., Aeronautics, UAS concentration
- University of North Dakota, 2020. Minors in computer science and mathematics.
Skills
- Robotics
- PX4, ROS 2
- Simulation
- Gazebo, AFSIM, SAFE-SiM, Unity
- ML and AI
- PyTorch, Ray, MLflow, TensorBoard, YOLO, ONNX
- Platforms
- Docker, Kubernetes, K3s, Helm, Spegel, GitLab CI/CD, Linux, WSL
- Observability
- Grafana, Prometheus
- Languages
- Python, C++, C#, Java, Bash
- Flying
- Commercial pilot with instrument and multi-engine ratings. Remote pilot.
Publications
- Schwalb, J., Sung, E., Menon, V., Weger, K., and Mesmer, B. “Understanding Human-AI Teaming and Engagement Behaviors in Critical Mission Scenarios in Virtual Environments.” IEEE Southeast Conference, 2026. DOI
- Schwalb, J., Menon, V., Tenhundfeld, N., Weger, K., Mesmer, B., and Gholston, S. “A Study of Drone-based AI for Enhanced Human-AI Trust and Informed Decision Making in Human-AI Interactive Virtual Environments.” 2022 IEEE International Conference on Human-Machine Systems. DOI
- Schwalb, E. and Schwalb, J. “Improving Redundancy and Safety of UTM by Leveraging Multiple UASs.” 2019 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems. DOI
Interests
- Planning agents
- Reinforcement learning
- Software optimization
- UAV swarms
- ML infrastructure
- Sim-to-real
- GPS-denied navigation
- Human-AI teaming
- Self-hosted and airgapped deployment
- SBOM and SLSA provenance
- General aviation