VSCL alumni Felix Turcios and current VSCL Ph.D. student Hannah Lehman are co-inventors on newly awarded US Patent 11,094,211, “Judgmental oversteering taxi aid system and method ”. The system creates a UI and integration system to guide the pilot for an autonomous taxi assistance program. The program is designed to help pilots taxi around airports, especially in situations where oversteer is required and may be difficult for the pilot to properly judge.
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- Felix Turcios
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- Hannah Lehman
Felix Turcios currently works at Collins Aerospace in Cedar Rapids Iowa as a Sr. Systems Engineer. Hannah Lehman is a former Collins Aerospace summer intern with Felix’s team in the Advanced Concepts Group.
Click here to view the patent.
Alex Gross, a Junior Aerospace engineering student, has been awarded the prestigious AIAA Cary Spitzer Digital Avionics Scholarship. 
VSCL Alumnus Roshawn Bowers ’03 has been awarded a Northrop Grumman Fellow for Vehicle Management Systems and Flight Control Systems Integration. She is also co-sponsoring a new program at Northrop Grumman which is targeted at recruiting and retaining women in senior technical roles. Bowers is an Engineering Manager who leads the development of advanced engineering systems for 
Garrett Jares ’17 presented the paper “Investigating Malware-in-the-Loop Autopilot Attack Using Falsification of Sensor Data”, which seeks to investigate and further understand the threat of UAS hijacking via cyber attack. The paper builds on previous work by further investigating an attack method in which the attacker attempts to gain control of the vehicle by intercepting and modifying the vehicle’s sensor data. This attack is explained analytically, demonstrated on a simple second-order system in a MATLAB/Simulink simulation, and validated in a series of Gazebo simulation experiments using the ArduPilot Software-In-The-Loop simulation. These experiments serve to validate and evaluate the performance of the attack on a real-world autopilot software and the attack is shown to pose a legitimate threat to the system.
Chris Leshikar ’20 presented the paper “Asymmetric Quadrotor Modeling and State-Space Identification”, which addresses system identification flight test results of an asymmetric quadrotor. The goal of the flight tests was to obtain a linear state-space model of an asymmetric Modified F450 quadrotor using the Observer/Kalman Identification (OKID) algorithm. Automated excitation maneuvers were injected using the Developmental Flight Test Instrumentation Two (DFTI2) system. The identified models obtained from the flight tests are then compared to analytical state-space models derived and presented in the paper. The identified linear state-space model using automated excitations matched reasonably well with the nonzero elements of the analytical linear state-space model.
VSCL Undergraduate researcher Alexander Gross ‘23 is the recipient of the 
VSCL is proud to welcome and host Michaela Stratton for the