2019 West: Premier Sea Services Event San Diego

Ray Buettner, Ph.D.
CRUSER Director
Naval Postgraduate School


Dr. Ray Buettner is a native of Virginia. He enlisted in the United States Navy and earned his Associate's and Bachelor's degrees before applying for Aviation Officer Candidate School. Following his commissioning, Ray earned designation as a Naval Flight Officer. During his nearly 23 years of naval service he also attended the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) where he earned his Master of Science Systems Engineering. Ray earned his doctorate in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. Dr. Buettner then joined the civilian faculty at the NPS. In addition to a full teaching and thesis advising load he served as the Joint Information Operations Chair. He was also appointed as the first Deputy Director of the Cebrowski Institute. Ray then began period of leave without pay during which he served as founder and Chief Technology Officer for Secure Cognition, Inc. applying technology licensed from the NSA in the commercial sector. In this role he worked with Silicon Valley venture capital funds and angel investors. Ray also worked as an independent consultant for Hybrid Knowledge LLC supporting companies working to bring new energy and pollution control technologies to the market place. Dr. Buettner returned to NPS in 2007 and has specialized in systems engineering, information operations, and field experimentation. He served as the Deputy Director of the Department of Defense's Information Operations Center for Excellence (IOCE) where he focused on graduate education and cyber issues. He was the NPS's first Director, Field Experimentation from 2009 to 2012. He has raised and executed over $40 million in sponsored research since 2009. His current research efforts focus on the design of multi-institutional semi structured learning environments (MISSLEs) and the evolving command, control and organization challenges associated with the use of robotics and autonomous systems for military applications. Ray is tenured in the Information Sciences Department where he teaches courses for multiple curricula. He also teaches courses for the Systems Engineering Department and the Cyber Academic Group. He is currently the Director and Principal Investigator for multiple research projects with budgets exceeding $5 million dollars annually. These projects include the Secretary of the Navy sponsored Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER), the Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) project, and the Advanced Robotics Systems Engineering Laboratory (ARSENL). CRUSER maintains a 3000 member community of interest with an emphasis on multi-institutional collaboration that includes more than 1200 industry members. It also supports faculty and student research while advising naval leadership regarding developments in the robotic and unmanned systems domain. JIFX incorporates more than three dozen experiments by commercial entities, from large defense contractors to small businesses, into its quarterly field events. ARSENL is one of the leaders in swarming robotics research having set the record for flying 50 fully autonomous vehicles in a swarm (2015) and executing the first swarm versus swarm "dogfight" in 2017.

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