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 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.

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

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VSCL graduate student Ritwik Bera has graduated with his Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Ritwik successfully defended his thesis “A Modular Framework for Training Autonomous Systems via Human Interaction” in December 2021. He is now working with Zoox in Foster CIty, CA as a Software Engineer in the Planning and Control department working on trajectory generation algorithms. Ritwik joined VSCL in 2019 after having spent a summer working with the lab in 2017 and has focused much of his work on human-in-the-loop learning to train autonomous systems to perform various tasks. Ritwik has also led the efforts for the Enhancing the Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems to Facilitate Human-Agent Teaming project.

 

 

 

VSCL graduate student Shelby Hackett has graduated with her Master of Engineering in Aerospace Engineering. Shelby will be going to work for Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA where she will be a part of the guidance, navigation, and control systems group and will aid in various space missions. Shelby has been a member of VSCL since Fall 2020 and has worked on a number of projects including Tightly Integrated Navigation and Guidance for Multiple Autonomous Agents. She has also served as a Teaching Assistant for AERO 321: Dynamics of Aerospace Vehicles and aided undergraduate students in learning aircraft stability and control.

 

 

 

 

VSCL graduate student Blake Krpec has graduated with his Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Blake successfully defended his thesis “Vision-Based Marker-Less Landing of a UAS On a Moving Ground Vehicle” in March 2022. He is now working as an Engineer in the Applied Sensing Department for Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, TX. Blake began working with VSCL during the fall semester of his sophomore year (Fall 2016) as an undergraduate research assistant and began working on his masters in August 2019. Blake was selected to be a Journeyman Fellow for the Army Research Lab and his main research interests include computer vision, controls using computer vision, and traditional controls applied to unmanned air systems

 

 

 

VSCL undergraduate research assistant Dakota Kridler has graduated with his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Dakota will be working as a Flight Test & Systems Engineer for Albers Aerospace in McKinney, TX. He has been working with VSCL since January 2019 and has worked to develop the air vehicle autonomy on the Agile Technology Development (ATD) – Air-Ground Coordinated Teaming project. Dakota is also a US Army veteran who served from 2012 to 2017 as an Infantryman during the Inherent Resolve Campaign.

 

 

 

 

VSCL undergraduate research assistant Luke Moy has graduated with his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Luke will be working as an R&D Engineer 1 at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Luke has been a member of VSCL since August 2020 and has been involved in much of the flight testing operations at RELLIS Campus. Luke has also been an integral part of the Tightly Integrated Navigation and Guidance for Multiple Autonomous Agents project.

VSCL Students Selected for Summer 2022 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 2022. 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 2022 include:

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant Connor Atkins has been selected for a Summer 2022 internship with Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, NM. Connor will be working as a Graduate Student Intern and assisting with documentation/procedure and testing of new systems within the physics lab. Connor has been a member of VSCL since 2018 and has worked on numerous projects. Currently, he is working with the flight testing group at the RELLIS Campus. Having experience with both the software and hardware sides of the vehicles, he performs preflight maintenance and aids in the testing of a variety of UAS that VSCL handles.

 

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Alex Gross has been selected for a Summer 2022 internship at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. Alex will be working as a Research & Development Intern focusing on applying machine learning to hypersonic applications. Alex is a Junior and has been a member of VSCL since 2020. He has focused his research on UAS autonomous guidance and landing, embedded systems, and user-interface integration.

 

 

 

 

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D Student Hannah Lehman has been selected for a Summer 2022 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. Hannah started working with VSCL as an undergraduate in the Spring of 2017, with her major roles including managing the flight simulator lab and performing research into reinforcement learning for use onboard aircraft. Hannah graduated with her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering in May 2020 and and continued with VSCL to pursue her Ph.D.

 

 

 

 

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and M.S. Student Cassie-Kay McQuinn has been selected for a Summer 2022 research internship at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. Cassie will be a Research and Development Intern with a focus of applying autonomy solutions to advance the national security mission. Cassie has been a member of VSCL since Spring 2021 and joined as a M.S. student in the Spring 2022 semester. Cassie-Kay’s main interests include flight test engineering, aircraft dynamics, and system identification.

 

 

 

 

 

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant Md Nazmus Sunbeam has been selected for a Summer 2022 internship with the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, MD. Sunbeam will be working as a Summer Student Researcher with the Human Research and Engineering Directorate developing algorithms and extensions for Cycle-of-Learning. Cycle-of-Learning is a framework for quick training of AI agents through human interaction. Sunbeam has been a member of VSCL: since August 2021. His research has focused on advancing the Cycle-of-Learning by investigating the use of similarity metrics.

 

 

 

 

 

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Carla Zaramella has been selected for a Summer 2022 internship at Raytheon Technologies in Tewksbury MA. Carla will be working as a Whole Life Program – Systems Engineering Intern in RTX Missiles and Defense with a team to ensure that hardware and systems are effective, reliable and maintainable. Carla is a Sophomore and has been a member of VSCL since January of 2022 and has been involved in flight testing and supporting research for system identification.

 

 

 

 

Valasek and Jares Present for Sandia National Labs STARCS Mission Campaign

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Valasek, John

Dr. John Valasek

Dr. John Valasek, Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and Director of the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, and VSCL student Garrett Jares gave a virtual seminar titled “Control Acquisition Attack of Aerospace Systems via False Data Injection of Sensor Data” for Sandia National Laboratories. The seminar was presented as part of a monthly seminar series for the Science and Technology Advancing Resilience for Contested Space (STARCS) Mission Campaign. The date of the seminar was 28 February 2022.

 

 

VSCL Graduate Student Maison Clouatre is Awarded Avilés-Johnson Fellowship

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Maison ClouatreVSCL Graduate Student Maison Clouatre has been awarded the Avilés-Johnson Fellowship – Doctoral. The fellowship citation states “Texas A&M University believes that diversity is an indispensable component of academic excellence. The Dr. Dionel Avilés ’53 and Dr. James Johnson ’67 Fellowship Program seeks to increase diversity in the graduate and professional student population at Texas A&M University and support the development of high achieving scholars who show promise of distinguished careers for the benefit of all students.”

Clouatre is grateful to be awarded the fellowship, and says “I am most humbled by my selection as an Avilés-Johnson fellow, and I am thankful to be part of a department and university that celebrates diversity. I am also thankful for Dr. John Valasek and his continued efforts—since I was an undergraduate freshman—to mentor me and recruit me to Texas A&M. His kindness is representative of the Texas A&M community and his efforts reflect the core values behind the Avilés-Johnson fellowship program.”

Maison Clouatre is an incoming Ph.D. student in the aerospace engineering department. He will graduate in May 2022 with a double major in electrical engineering and mathematics from Mercer University. As an undergraduate, Clouatre held visiting research positions in the Electronic Systems (ELSYS) Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory (VSCL) at Texas A&M University, and the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research interests lay at the intersection of control theory, optimization, and learning, and he focuses on applying his theory to the fields of quantum information science and aerospace engineering. Clouatre is both a Goldwater Scholar and Stamps Scholar. At VSCL, Clouatre will research quantum control and learning for quantum dynamics.

VSCL Student Blake Krpec Defends Master of Science Thesis

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VSCL student Blake Krpec, who will graduate with his Master of Science degree in May 2022, has defended his thesis “Vision-Based Marker-Less Landing of a UAS On a Moving Ground Vehicle”.  Blake’s defense had 34 people in attendance including many in attendance from the Army Research Lab.  His committee is Drs. Reza Langari, Manoranjan Majji, Srikanth Saripalli, and Stephen Nogar (special committee member from Army Research Laboratory and the Technical Monitor). His research is supported as a Journeyman Fellow by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) on an Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Fellowship. Blake has been working with VSCL for 7 years after joining as a freshman. After graduation, Blake will work with Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, TX.

VSCL Postdoctoral Researcher Sangwoo Moon Joins JPL

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Dr. Sangwoo Moon, postdoctoral researcher in VSCL, has accepted a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Moon will be working with the JPL Robotics Group, Robotic Aerial Mobility. His work at JPL will be mainly focused on communication-aware decision making and perception approaches for multi-robot systems. The work will include software development/integration for data fusion and multi-level planning/control, simulation verification/validation to assess the developed approaches, and hardware demonstration and evaluation with heterogeneous multi-robot systems with harsh communication environments.

Dr. Moon has worked with VSCL since March 2021. As a research engineer, he was involved in the hardware/software implementation for large hexacopter platforms. He particularly developed specialized hardware and software components for the vehicles consisting of a battery monitoring system, onboard computer set up for planning and guidance, and terrain-following algorithms. He worked with VSCL flight crews to evaluate the vehicles, in which his team including himself took flight tests of over 200 sorties and 60 hours of flight time. He contributed to the successful demonstration of a cooperative zone recon mission with four large hexarotors for searching unknown ground moving targets.

Valasek Presents at 6th Annual UAS Handling Qualities Workshop

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Valasek, John

Dr. John Valasek

Dr. John Valasek, Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and Director of the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, gave a virtual seminar titled “Flight Results of Autopilot Gain Tuning for Large Hexacopter Handling Qualities” for the 6th Annual UAS Handling Qualities Workshop. The date of the seminar was 28 January 2022.

Spring 2022 FoRCE Online Seminar by Valasek – January 28 at 11:00 Central Time

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Valasek, John

Dr. John Valasek

Seminar 1:  Multiple-Time-Scale Nonlinear Output Feedback Control of Systems With Model Uncertainties (Dr. John Valasek)

WebEx Link: https://force.my.webex.com/force.my/j.php?MTID=mba10bd9e12f5b612d2adc2b79c1c7d2f

Meeting number (access code): 2550 544 5654

Meeting password: neCev2rfT35 (63238273 from phones and video systems)

 

Abstract: Systems with dynamics evolving in distinct slow and fast timescales include aircraft (Khalil & Chen, 1990), robotic manipulators, (Tavasoli, Eghtesad, & Jafarian, 2009), electrical power systems (Sauer, 2011), chemical reactions (Mélykúti, Hespanha, & Khammash, 2014), production planning in manufacturing (Soner, 1993), and so on.  The Geometric Singular Perturbation theory (Fenichel, 1979) is a powerful control law development tool for multiple-timescale systems because it provides physical insight into the evolution of the states in more than one timescale.  The behaviour of the full-order system can be approximated by the slow subsystem, provided that the fast states can be stabilised on an equilibrium manifold.  The fast subsystem describes how the fast states evolve from their initial conditions to their equilibrium trajectory or the manifold.  This presentation develops two nonlinear, multiple-time-scale, output feedback tracking controllers for a class of nonlinear, nonstandard systems with slow and fast states, slow and fast actuators, and model uncertainties. The class of systems is motivated by aircraft with uncertain inertias, control derivatives, engine time-constant, and without direct measurement of angle-of-attack and sideslip angle. One controller achieves the control objective of slow state tracking, while the other does simultaneous slow and fast state tracking.  Each controller is synthesized using time-scale separation, lower-order reduced subsystems, and estimates of unknown parameters and unmeasured states. The estimates are updated dynamically, using an online parameter estimator and a nonlinear observer. The update laws are so chosen that errors remain ultimately bounded for the full-order system. The controllers are simulated on a six-degree-of-freedom, high-performance aircraft model commanded to perform a demanding, combined longitudinal and lateral/directional maneuver. Even though two important aerodynamic angles are not measured, tracking is adequate and as good as a previously developed full-state feedback controller handling similar parametric uncertainties.  Additionally, even though the two controllers in theory achieve two different control objectives, it is possible to choose either one of them for the same maneuver. Of the two new output feedback controllers, the slow state tracker accomplishes the maneuver with less control effort, while the simultaneous slow and fast state tracker does so with a smaller number of gains to tune.

 

VSCL student Ritwik Bera Defends Master of Science Thesis

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VSCL student Ritwik Bera, who will graduate with his Master of Science degree in May 2022, has defended his thesis “A Modular Framework for Training Autonomous Systems via Human Interaction”.  Bera joined VSCL in 2019 after having spent a summer working with the lab in 2017. Bera previously participated in summer a internships at Zoox in Summer 2021. After graduation, Bera will work with Zoox in Foster CIty, CA as a Software Engineer in the Planning and Control department working on trajectory generation algorithms.

VSCL Graduate Students Present Papers at the 2022 AIAA SciTech Forum

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VSCL graduate students Garrett Jares, Chris Leshikar, and Hannah Lehman will present papers in January at the 2022 AIAA SciTech Forum in San Diego, California.

Garrett Jares ’17 will be presenting the paper “Flight Demonstration and Validation of Control Acquisition Autopilot Attack”. The paper investigated a method of cyber attack by which an attacker might take over control of a vehicle. This paper built upon prior work by demonstrating and validating the attack on a DJI F450 quadrotor running the ArduCopter autopilot. The experiments focused on two scenarios. One in which the victim performed regulation while the attacker performed non-zero setpoint control and another in which the victim performed non-zero setpoint control while the attacker performed regulation of the system. The experimental results show how the attack poses a threat to real-world UAS and evaluates its performance under different control scenarios.

 

 

Hannah Lehman ’20 will be presenting the paper “Addressing Undesirable Emergent Behavior in Deep Reinforcement Learning UAS Ground Target Tracking”, which seeks to investigate and further understand the impact of emergent behavior in reinforcement learning controlled UAS. The paper builds on previous work by further investigating a fixed wing tracking a ground target through reinforcement learning and extends the learning environment and possible agent behavior. The emergent behavior is discovered, categorized, and mitigated through a number of algorithmic, reward, and environment modifications. These approaches are evaluated in simulation based on their ability to improve tracking and extend total tracking time.

 

 

Chris Leshikar ’20 will be presenting the paper “System Identification Flight Testing of Inverted V-Tail small Unmanned Air System”, which addresses challenges in conducting flight testing an inverted V-Tail fixed-winged vehicle and the results obtained from the flight tests. The goal of the flight tests was to obtain longitudinal, lateral/directional and combined longitudinal lateral/directional linear state-space model for the RMRC Anaconda using the Observer\Kalman Identification (OKID) algorithm. Both manual and automated excitation signals were injected into the Anaconda. Parametric sweeps of the excitation signals were performed using the Developmental Flight Test Instrumentation Two (DFTI2) system. The identified longitudinal linear state-space model modelled the longitudinal dynamics well and the identified lateral/directional reasonably well while the identified combined longitudinal lateral/directional model showed decent correlation with the decoupled models.