People, Innovation, Excellence

Research Goal

Utilize the Theory-Computation-Experiment paradigm to research Low Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology (LCAAT) with autonomy to establish trust, providing a game changing capability that transforms the way manned and unmanned air, space, and ground systems are designed, controlled, and operated to effectively accomplish missions and tasks. VSCL is thus focused on synergistic strategies for the analysis, control, validation & verification of complex autonomous vehicle and sensor systems operating in challenging environments.

The Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory is directed by Dr. John Valasek.

Graduate Research Assistant Positions Available

The Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory (VSCL) has multiple fully funded Ph.D. positions in Aerospace Engineering that are available in Spring 2022, focused on the following areas:

Human-in-the-Loop Artificial Intelligence, which includes integrating multiple human interaction modalities to learning algorithms such as reinforcement learning; learning from human demonstrations, interventions and/or evaluations; unsupervised and/or weakly supervised segmentation of task demonstrations; human-agent teaming and task hierarchy discovery on multi-agent scenarios; and others.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Coordinated Autonomous Unmanned Air Systems (UAS), which includes learning algorithms such as deep reinforcement learning; policy optimization and policy gradient methods; target tracking from computer vision; multi-agent teaming; human-agent teaming, task hierarchy on multi-agent scenarios; and others.

U.S. citizenship is required for some positions, but not all of them.

More information and details for applying can be found here.

VSCL Students Selected for Summer 2023 Internships

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Many students of the Texas A&M Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory have been selected for offsite internships for the Summer of 2023. 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 2023 include:

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D Student Chris Leshikar has been selected for a Summer 2023 internship with the Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation this summer in Savannah, GA. Chris will be working in the Flight Dynamics group on system identification methods and analyses for jets going through the certification process.

 

 

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D Student Hannah Lehman has been selected for a Summer 2023 research internship at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. Hannah has been working as a Year-Round Research & Development Intern since 2020, with a principal focus of applying machine learning to defense vehicles.

 

 

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and MS student MD-Nazmus Sunbeam has been selected for a Summer 2023 internship with Starfish Space in Seattle, WA. Sunbeam will be working on computer vision / navigation DL algorithms for space vehicles.

 

 

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and MS Student Cassie-Kay McQuinn has been selected for a Summer 2023 research internship at the Airforce Research Labatory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, OH.

 

 

 

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant Jillian Bennett has been selected for a Summer 2023 research internship with VSCL. Jillian will be starting the adaptive time scale control project.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Seth Johnson has been selected for a Summer 2023 internship with VectorNav in Dallas, TX. Seth will be working as a Nevigation Engineer.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Yuki Janvier has been selected for a Summer 2023 internship with Atlassian in Austin, TX. Yuki will be working as a Software Engineering Intern.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Katelyn Lancaster has been selected for a Summer 2023 internship with Lockheed Martin in Marietta, GA. Katelyn will be doing Test and Evaluation engineering.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Carla Zaramella has been selected for a Summer 2023 internship with Raytheon in Tewsbury, MA. Carla will be working as a “Whole Life Program – Systems Engineering Intern” in RTX Missiles and Defense. She will be working with a team to ensure that hardware and systems are effective, reliable and maintainable, the goal of WLE.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Laura Escamilla has been selected for a Summer 2023 research internship with VSCL. Laura will be working with a Vector nav calibration for the anaconda, and will support the Robust Threat Detection project.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Abby Andrews has been selected for a Summer 2023 research internship with Impact Systems Engineering in Temple, TX. Abby will be working with 4200 and 5200 3D printers, with her role primarily focusing on de-powering parts and structuring builds units.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Payton Clem has been selected for a Summer 2023 research internship with VSCL. Payton will be working with systems architecture on the Robust Threat Detection project.

VSCL Students Graduate with PhD, M.Eng., and B.S. Degrees

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VSCL graduate student Dr. Kameron Eves has graduated with his Doctor of Philosophy on May 13th in Aerospace Engineering.

VSCL graduate student Dr. Garrett Jares has graduated with his Doctor of Philosophy on May 13th in Aerospace Engineering.

VSCL graduate student Esteban Gomez has graduated with his Master of Science on May 13th in Aerospace Engineering.

VSCL graduate student Connor Atkins has graduated with his Master of Science on May 13th in Aerospace Engineering.

VSCL undergraduate student Alexander Gross has graduated with his Bachelors on May 12th in Aerospace Engineering.

VSCL undergraduate student Cameron Brooks has graduated with his Bachelors on May 12th in Aerospace Engineering.

VSCL undergraduate student Lauren Herrera has graduated with her Bachelors on May 12th in Aerospace Engineering.

VSCL undergraduate student Jillian Bennett has graduated with her Bachelors on May 12th in Aerospace Engineering.

 

 

VSCL Hosts Dr. Dimitra Panagou

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VSCL hosted Dr. Dimitra Panagou, Associate Professor with the Department of Robotics, and the Department of Aerospace Engineering Department, University of Michigan. Dr. Panagou met with Lab Director Dr. John Valasek and several VSCL Graduate Students. Dr. Panagou gave a presentation on Tunable Control Barrier Functions for Multi-Agent Safety Via Trust Adaptation and discussed UAS autonomy research and safe and resilient (secure) multi-agent systems.

Kameron Eves Defends Ph.D. Dissertation on Wednesday, 1 March 2023

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Kameron Eves (B.S. Mechanical Engineering, BYU) successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Multiple-Timescale Adaptive Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Dynamical Systems”. Kameron’s dissertation investigated combining nonlinear multiple time-scale controllers that VSCL has been researching for the last 15 years, with adaptive controllers which VSCL has been researching for more than 20 years.  Multiple-timescale control has been shown to have difficulty with uncertain systems and adaptive control has been shown to have difficulty with multiple-timescale systems.  His dissertation describes a novel control methodology called [K]Control of Adaptive Multiple-timescale Systems (KAMS).  KAMS seeks to address systems that simultaneously exhibit uncertain and multiple-timescale behaviors.  Unlike traditional multiple-timescale control literature, KAMS uses adaptive control to stabilize the subsystems.  The reference models and adapting parameters used in adaptive control significantly complicate the stability analysis.  KAMS is a flexible theory and framework and the stability proofs apply to a wide array of adaptive algorithms and multiple-timescale fusion techniques.  Additionally, formal and numerical validation of how KAMS can relax the minimum phase assumption for a multitude of common adaptive control methods.  KAMS is demonstrated and evaluated on examples consisting of stabilization and attitude control of a quadrotor Unmanned Air System; fuel-efficient orbital transfer maneuvers; and preventing inlet unstart on hypersonic aircraft.

A proposal on KAMS was submitted to DoD sponsors, and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) awarded a three-year research project to continue this work, and flight test it.  Conference and journal papers are being written on this work.

Kameron’s is the 57th graduate degree earned by a VSCL graduate student.   Kameron graduated from the Mechanical Engineering Department at BYU in 2019, with minors in mathematics and business.  At BYU, Kameron worked in the Multiple Agent Intelligent Coordination and Control (MAGICC) laboratory.  He will be starting work as an Assistant Professor at Utah Tech University in June.

VSCL Student Presents at ACC

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VSCL graduate student Kameron Eves will present a paper in May at the 2023 American Control Conference (ACC) in San Diego, California.

Kameron Eves will be presenting the paper “Adaptive Control for Non-minimum Phase Systems Via Time Scale Separation,”. Adaptive control for non-minimum phase systems remains a challenging problem. Eves proposes a method of adaptive control for systems that may be both nonlinear and non-minimum phase. This is accomplished by exploiting time scale separation between the internal and external dynamics.

 

VSCL Senior Alexander Gross Receives College of Engineering Fellowship

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VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Alex Gross is one of two AERO student recipients of the new College of Engineering Horizons: 21 Fellowships for 21st Century Scholars (EHDF). The EHDF provides 21 research fellowships for domestic students beginning their PhD program at Texas A&M University. This fellowship includes a $30,000 fellowship stipend provided by the College of Engineering (COE) during the first year of doctoral studies, full tuition and required student fees for full-time enrollment, a professional development scholarship of $1,500 for first year, mentorship, and funding provided by the Department of Aerospace Engineering via a Graduate Assistantship (Teaching or Research) during subsequent years.

Gross is an Engineering Honors undergraduate student pursuing his B.S. degree in aerospace engineering with minors in mathematics and computer science.  He is currently a Year-Round Undergraduate Research and Development Intern at Sandia National Laboratories, working on the  Autonomy for Hypersonics program.  Gross is a recipient of the prestigious AIAA Cary Spitzer Digital Avionics Scholarship, the Herman F. Heep Scholarship, the Benjamin R and Deaana J Smith Scholarship, and the Dean’s Honor Roll.  Gross is currently President of the TAMU AIAA Student Branch, and Secretary of the TAMU Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.  He is a 2020 award-Winning Proposal recipient of the  L’SPACE NASA Proposal Writing and Evaluation Experience Academy.

Gross has been a member of VSCL since 2020 and is currently working on the research project Enhancing the Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems to Facilitate Human-Agent Teaming , and he has contributed to the Autonomous Intelligent Detection Tracking and Recognition (AIDTR)  and Agile Technology Development (ATD)  – Air-Ground Coordinated Teaming  projects.  He also Investigated and developed reinforcement learning algorithms for training of Mars rover vehicles for NASA JPL.  His research interests are on UAS autonomous guidance and landing, embedded systems, and user-interface integration.  His goal is to work in the aerospace industry as a vehicle guidance, navigation and control engineer for spaceflight vehicles.

VSCL students present at AIAA SciTech Forum

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VSCL graduate students Kameron Eves and David Van Wijk will present papers in January at the 2023 AIAA SciTech Forum in National Harbor, MD.

Kameron Eves will be presenting the paper “Introduction to Adaptive Control for Multiple Time Scale Systems”. Eves presents a novel approach to Adaptive Control for Multiple Time Scale Systems with [K]Control of Adaptive Multiple Time Scale Systems (KAMS). KAMS fuses two adaptive control signals using multiple time scale techniques. Generalized formal definitions, stability criteria, and examples are developed and presented for each method. Results show that [K]Control of Adaptive Multiple Time Scale
Systems has the best performance because each reduced-order model is stabilized separately and because the fast dynamics converge to the manifold more quickly than the other methods.

 

 

 

David Van Wijk will be presenting the paper “Deep Reinforcement Learning Controller for Autonomous Tracking of Evasive Ground Target”. Van Wijk presents a method of tracking an evasive ground target using deep RL on a rotorcraft wherein the target attempts to hide behind occlusions. A variety of environment conditions are trained and evaluated, resulting in an agent able to successfully track a randomly moving target with the presence of occlusions.

 

Garrett Jares Defends Ph.D. Dissertation on Thursday, 1 December 2022

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Garrett Jares (B.S. Computer Science, Texas A&M University) successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Control Acquisition Attack of Feedback Control System by False Data Injection”.   Garrett is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support his research in Aerospace Cybersecurity.  Garrett has accepted a position as a Research Engineer with Southwest Research Institute. He is currently a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Cybersecurity Working Group, and his main research interests include cybersecurity and cryptography applied to air and space systems.  Congratulations Garrett, all of VSCL is very proud of you and your accomplishments!

VSCL Alumnus Bowers Awarded Northrop Grumman Fellow

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Roshawn Bowers ’03 & ’05, a former student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, 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 that focuses on recruiting and retaining women in senior technical roles. Bowers is currently an engineering manager who leads the development of advanced engineering systems for Northrop Grumman Aeronautics Systems in San Diego, California.

“I am very fortunate to have had great teachers and mentors to help me along the way,” said Bowers. “I feel like I got a first-class education at Texas A&M, and I don’t believe any other university could have prepared me better for my career.”

As an undergraduate and graduate student, Bowers conducted research in the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory with Dr. John Valasek, professor in the aerospace engineering department. She researched relative navigation systems and assisted with flight testing of an unmanned powered parachute vehicle for NASA’s X-38 project. At the conclusion of her graduate degree, she defended her Master of Science thesis titled “Estimation algorithm for autonomous aerial refueling utilizing a vision based relative navigation system” in April 2005 and then joined Northrop Grumman.

Previously, Bowers had done co-op tours at Lockheed Martin Space Operations in Houston on the International Space Station Extravehicular Activity Test Team and the Environmental Control and Life Support Systems team. She also did a co-op on the F-16 Block 60 program for Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth, Texas.

While in school at Texas A&M, Bowers researched the Automatic Carrier Landing System as a member of the Engineering Scholars Program and received the Texas A&M Graduate Merit Fellowship and the Isadore Roosth ’33 Engineering Scholarship. She was the chairman of Sigma Gamma Tau, the Aerospace Engineering Honor Society, and a member of Phi Eta Sigma, the Freshman Honor Society. Bowers participated in the Texas A&M Engineering High School Conference, Help One Student To Succeed (HOSTS), and Aggie Replant.

The official College of Engineering press release can be found here.

Clouatre, Valasek, Balas, and Gehlot Publish “Linear Quantum State Observers”

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On September 28, 2022, Maison Clouatre and John Valasek of VSCL, in tandem with Mark Balas of the Texas A&M Mechanical Engineering Department and Vinod Gehlot of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, published the paper “Linear Quantum State Observers” in IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering. This paper develops fundamental results for using linear observers to infer an unknown state of a quantum dynamical system. The theoretical contributions of the article are three-fold:

  1. A quantum observability test is provided in terms of two “quantum observability matrices”. This test is shown to be more computationally efficient than testing the Kalman observability matrix of  the same quantum system.
  2. A canonical quantum state observer is derived, which guarantees that the observer error tends to the unobservable space of any quantum system with positive operator valued measure (POVM) output.
  3. The canonical observer preserves the Hermiticity of the observer’s state. This allows one to efficiently project the observer’s state onto the set of valid quantum density matrices while
    retaining the convergence rate of the observer.

This publication is part of VSCL’s ongoing work in the area of control for quantum information systems. The early access version of the article can be viewed on IEEE’s website: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9904875.