VSCL hosted Dr. Jaret Riddick, Director of the Army Research Laboratory, and Dr. Bryan Glaz, Chief Scientist of the Army Research Laboratory at the Texas A&M University UAS Flight Testing Facility at RELLIS Campus. Dr. Jaret Riddick and Dr. Bryan Glaz spoke with VSCL lab director Dr. John Valasek and VSCL graduate student Vinicius G. Goecks about the work VSCL completes at the flight testing facility and toured the grounds.
Pictured are Vinicius, Dr. Riddick, Dr. Glaz, and Dr. Valasek
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Dr. John Valasek and Co-Inventors Andrew Beckett, James F. May, and Cecil C. Rhodes with research team and Pegasus at RELLIS Campus hangar.
A team of inventors from the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, in the Department of Aerospace Engineering A&M University, have been awarded U.S. Patent 9,957,035 for Un-Manned Aerial Vehicle Having Adjustable Wing Module, Tail, and Landing Gear. The Pegasus Unmanned Air System (UAS) was conceived, specified, designed, built, and flown by the team of Dr. John Valasek, Professor, Graduate Research Assistants Andrew Beckett and James F. May, and A&P Technician and Flight Mechanics Specialist Cecil C. Rhodes Jr. Pegasus was conceived as the Control Systems Integration Testbed (CONSINT) for researching and evaluating fault tolerant adaptive control laws, autoland control laws, and a variety airborne sensors for imaging and tracking missions.
Video of the Pegasus flight operations can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/NWg24afA5GU
The Pegasus patent can be viewed here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9957035B2/en
Pegasus has 80+ flights at the Texas A&M University RELLIS campus, out of its design life of 300 takeoff and landing cycles. The airframe has a wing span of 12 feet and is designed to 7g limit maneuvering load factor and has a maximum takeoff weight of 108 pounds. Pegasus can carry 30 pounds of payload in the nose and fuselage payload bay, which has a volume of 12U half-width rack chassis. Pegasus features variable static stability with a positionable wing location on the fuselage and multiple redundant control surfaces: 8 ailerons, 2 elevators, 2 rudders, and throttle. Pegasus has a stall speed at maximum takeoff weight of 26 knots and a maximum speed of 90 knots. The endurance is 1+ hour depending upon fuel system configuration.
The January 2019 edition of Aerospace America’s annual Year in Review section for Information Systems featured the flight-demonstration of a machine learning algorithm developed by a team of VSCL students and faculty. The article discussed the progression of the project from its first demonstration in December 2017 to more recent demonstrations. The algorithm is based on Q-Learning and provides a control policy for the vehicle’s orientation in order to keep the target fixed in the image frame autonomously. The algorithm was tested against stationary and randomly moving targets in both a structured and unstructured environment.
The Aerospace America article can be found here.
Dr. John Valasek, Vinicius Goecks, Hannah Lehman, Zeke Bowden, and Blake Krpec.
General John M. Murray is talking to John Valasek, a resident A&M expert on unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
Courtesy of The Texas A&M University System
General John Murray and his staff recently got their first chance to size up the research possibilities in College Station. As part of that visit, General Murray was shown the UAS flight testing activities of VSCL, during a research test flight on INS performance being conducted under the sponsorship of VectorNav Technologies, LLC.
The full article can be found on Texas Monthly, here.
Dr. John Valasek, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and director of the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, has been elected the chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Intelligent Systems Technical Committee (ISTC).
The ISTC addresses the application of Intelligent System (IS) technologies and methods to aerospace systems, the verification and validation of these systems, and the education of the AIAA membership in the use of IS technologies in aerospace and other technical disciplines.
Please see the full announcement by Jan McHarg on the Texas A&M College of Engineering website, here: https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2019/01/valasek-elected-chair-of-aiaa-intelligent-systems-technical-committee.html
Dr. John Valasek
On September 28th and 29th, members of the Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory participated in the MD5 & Army Futures Command A-Hack-of-the-Drones event where developers were tasked with coming together to explore “non-traditional, innovative methods to counter sUAS.” There were four major areas of focus for the hackathon:
We are proud to announce that the “A” Team, a multidisciplinary group of engineers from Texas A&M University and the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), was one of three teams that won the A-Hack-of-the-Drones hackathon and were awarded $15,000 to continue developing their ideas in partnership with MD5.
As the Texas A&M University Aerospace Engineering Department reports in the official announcement by Jan McHarg, found here:
“The “A” Team’s inspiration came from the major concern shared by both the United States and its allies like South Korea that the growing ubiquity of low-cost sUAS allows anyone with one of these devices to enter regions of civil or military interest and wreak havoc in ways unimaginable. Their belief was that it was of prime importance for agencies engaged in national security to be capable of detecting and tracking these devices to better protect the interests of those they serve.”
Three graduate student VSCL team members participated on the “A” Team and contributed their unique skills and understanding of sUAS and machine learning to the development of the “A”-team’s computer vision target-tracking solution. The three team members are:
We are very proud of all the VSCL team members who participated in the hackathon and the “A” Team as a whole. We look forward to hearing about the continued development of your solution in the future.
Dr. John Valasek, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and director of the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, has been selected as the 2017-18 inductee into the University of Kansas Aerospace Engineering Honor Roll for his national contributions to Unmanned Air Systems (UAS). This award is given annually and recognizes alumni and other friends of the aerospace engineering department who have made major contributions to the aerospace engineering profession. Members of the honor roll serve in perpetuity as role models for aerospace engineering students and the public at large.
Please see the full announcement by Jan McHarg on the Texas A&M College of Engineering website, here: https://engineering.
Please see the official announcement by Jan McHarg on the Texas A&M Aerospace Engineering Department website, here: Goecks awarded graduate research fellowship by Army Research Laboratory
Many students of the Texas A&M Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory have been selected for offsite internships for the Summer of 2018. These internships show VSCL student representation at a variety of companies and institutions across the United States. Students which have been selected for internships in the Summer of 2018 include:
VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D. Student Vinicius G. Goecks has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at US Army Research Lab in Aberdeen, MD. Vinicius will be working as a Research Fellow on the US Army initiative to investigate how humans can shape the behavior of autonomous machines driven by learning algorithms. Vinicius has been an active member of VSCL since Spring 2016, focusing on human-machine interaction and the control of UAS with Machine Learning, and the Intelligent Motion Video Target Tracking for UAS.
VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and Master of Engineering Student Emily Fojtik has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at VectorNav Technologies, Dallas, TX. Emily will be working as a Test Engineer Intern, with a principal focus of automating and expediting the verification and validation of products at VectorNav. Emily started working with VSCL in the Spring of 2016, with her major roles including managing the Texas A&M University Engineering Flight Simulator and developing a means for evaluating human factors aspects for Head Mounted Displays (HMD) for Enhanced Vision System technologies.
VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B. S. Aerospace Engineering student Charles Noren has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA. Charles will be working as a Technical Intern at the Autonomy Incubator. He will be performing research on guidance laws and motion planning for autonomous robots. Charles has been an active member of VSCL since Spring 2015, where he has worked on projects including the Shape Memory Alloy Actuator Replacement, the autonomous railroad scout vehicle, and the Intelligent Motion Video Target Tracking for UAS.
VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B.S. Aerospace Engineering student Blake Krpec has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at Air Tractor, in Olney, TX. Blake will be working as an Aerospace Engineering Intern, where he will be working on developing on board electronic flight systems for production aircraft as well as systems for R&D flights. Blake has been an active member of VSCL since Fall 2016, where he has supported VSCL flight test projects relating to sensor integration and aircraft performance.
VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B.S. Aerospace Engineering student Hannah Lehman has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, IA. Hannah will be working as a Technical Systems Engineer on the Advanced Concepts team in Commercial Systems. She will be a part a new initiative in the Research and Development of autonomous systems for commercial purposes. Hannah has been an active member of VSCL since Fall 2017, focusing on human-machine interaction and the control of UAS with Machine Learning.
VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B.S. Aerospace Engineering Student Victoria Nagorski has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at Northrop Grumman Corporation in Melbourne, FL. Victoria will be working as a Technical Intern to investigate how to write a flight test plan. Victoria has been an active member of VSCL since Fall 2017, where she supports a variety of VSCL UAS flight test projects from aircraft performance test to sensor evaluation.
VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B.S. Aerospace Engineering Student Christopher A. Marcario has been selected for a position at the Texas A&M Cybersecurity Center for calendar year 2018. Chris will be working as an Undergraduate Researcher for the Cyber Spectrum Collaborative Research Environment, which is funded by Air Force Research Laboratory through Clarkson Aerospace, to identify vulnerabilities and demonstrate exploits on civilian unmanned aerial vehicles. Chris has been an active member of VSCL since Spring 2018, focusing on evaluating human factors aspects for head mounted displays for Enhanced Vision System technologies in the Texas A&M University Engineering Flight Simulator.
Congratulations to all who have been selected for internships!
Joshua Harris, a December 2017 graduate from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and a graduate research assistant of the Texas A&M Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory, has been awarded the 2018 Association of Former Students Distinguished Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Research in the Masters category. He defended his master’s thesis titled “Nonlinear Adaptive Inversion Control for Variable Stability Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems” in October 2017, and he is being recognized for his outstanding academic record and contributions in aerospace engineering by a distinguished committee of reviewers.
Please see the full announcement by Jan McHarg on the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station website, here: “Harris recognized for research excellence at national and university levels”
