Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory

Research Goal

Integrate Low Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology (LCAAT) with autonomy to establish trust, providing a game changing capability that transforms the way manned and unmanned systems are designed, controlled, and operated to effectively accomplish missions and tasks.

UAS Research and Flight Testing by the Numbers

  • 20 Years of Fixed-Wing UAS Flight Testing under FAA Auspices
  • 19 Externally Funded UAS Research Programs (1999 – Present)
  • 400+ Flights with an operational tempo of 133 thermal IR and multi-spectral data collection flights in the field over 12 months (2015 – 2016)
  • 24 Certified UAS Flight Testers Currently on Staff
  • 3 Certified UAS Pilots Currently on Staff
  • 13 UAS Vehicles in Current Fleet

VSCL Students Fojtik and Bowden Graduate with Masters of Engineering

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VSCL Graduate Research Assistant Emily Fojtik graduated with her Master of Engineering degree in May 2019 and has been hired by VectorNav Technologies, Dallas, TX. Emily will be working as a Test Engineer 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 Graduate Research Assistant Zeke Bowden graduated with his Master of Engineering degree in June 2019 and has been hired by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, Fort Worth, TX.  Zeke started working with VSCL in the Fall of  2014, and as one of the principal pilots with a Remote Pilot Certificate and Certified UAS Operator, has played a key role in every Unmanned Air System (UAS) project as either a UAS pilot or as a flight test engineer.  He had previously done a summer internship as a flight test engineer at Insitu Inc., Hood River, OR.

VSCL undergraduate Hannah Lehman recognized for scholastic and research excellence at national and college of engineering levels

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Hannah Lehman ‘20, a senior in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and an undergraduate research assistant of the Texas A&M Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, has been awarded the AIAA Foundation Cary Spitzer Digital Avionics Scholarship for the 2019/2020 academic year.  She is being recognized for her outstanding academic record and her research contributions in Reinforcement Learning for the intelligent control of Unmanned Air Systems.  The scholarship is awarded annually to a college student in good academic standing who is pursuing a degree in aerospace engineering, or aeronautical engineering.

Hannah was recognized as the 2019 Gathright Phi Kappa Phi Outstanding Junior in the College of Engineering.  Each year, the deans in each college are asked to select the most outstanding student from among all the juniors in their respective colleges based on research and/or creative production, community engagement, accomplishments/awards, and academic record, with the final selection criteria determined by the dean of each respective college.  Named in honor of the first president of the A&M College of Texas, it was established in April 1973 by The Association of Former Students in conjunction with Texas A&M’s Student Government Association.  As of Spring 2019, this award has become a collaboration between The Association of Former Students, LAUNCH: Academic Excellence, and the Texas A&M chapter of Phi Kappa Phi and has been renamed the “Gathright Phi Kappa Phi Outstanding Junior” award.

 

Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems from Human Interaction Presented by Vinicius Goecks at AAAI-19 Conference

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VSCL Graduate Research Assistant Vinicius Goecks presented a paper on Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems from Human Interaction at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI-19 on 31 January. Co-authored by researchers from the US Army Research Laboratory’s Human Research and Engineering Directorate, this continuing project investigates how to utilize different forms of human interaction to safely train autonomous systems in real-time by learning from both human demonstrations and interventions. This method improves task completion performance for the same amount of human interaction when compared to learning from demonstrations alone, while also requiring on average 32% fewer data to achieve that performance. This provides evidence that combining multiple modes of human interaction can increase both the training speed and overall performance of policies for autonomous systems. The paper documenting this work is “Efficiently Combining Human Demonstrations and Interventions for Safe Training of Autonomous Systems in Real-Time,” AAAI-2019-6613.

 

Valasek Invited Panelist in Forum 360 Webinar on Verification and Validation in the Age of Autonomy at 2019 AIAA SciTech Conference

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Dr. John Valasek, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and director of the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, was in invited panelist on the topic of Verification and Validation in the Age of Autonomy at the 2019 AIAA SciTech Conference, 10 January 2019, San Diego, CA.

Panelists in the session discussed the V&V of autonomous systems and how they pose a challenge for regulators and others tasked with evaluating those systems.  As the second and third waves of autonomy become reality, concerns arise as to the safety and reliability of new technologies that leverage these capabilities. Methods for verification and validation of software that enable autonomous systems must be developed to support new certification processes. For safety critical systems, ethical issues regarding machine decision making and the role of human-on-the-loop paradigms must be addressed. For defense applications, mission assurance will be a significant driving factor in certifying systems for deployment. How can government authorities, companies, and the general public be assured that new, autonomous technologies are reliable?

In the webinar recording below please go to 41:00 to see Dr. Valasek’s introductory presentation, before the Q&A with the audience begins:  https://livestream.com/AIAAvideo/scitech2019/videos/185656997

Details of the session and participants can be found here:

https://scitech.aiaa.org/Intelligent-Systems-Create-Validation-Challenges/

 

VSCL Hosts Army Research Laboratory

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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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Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory Awarded Patent for Design of Unmanned Air System

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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.

 

 

VSCL’s Reinforcement Learning Control Law for Ground Target Tracking Featured in January’s Aerospace America

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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.

Texas A&M Says Howdy to the Army Futures Command

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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.

Valasek elected chair of AIAA Intelligent Systems Technical Committee

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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 

Valasek, John

Dr. John Valasek