In October Dr. John Valasek reached a career milestone by presenting at his 100th invited seminar/lecture/panelist.
Chronologically:
#1 “Fighter Agility Metrics, Research, and Test,” Lockheed Advanced Development Projects Division (Skunk Works), Burbank, CA, 13 July 1990.
#100 “Multiple-Time-Scale Nonlinear Output Feedback Control of Systems With Model Uncertainties,” Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 9 October 2024.
Congratulations Dr. Valasek!
VSCL is proud to welcome two new graduate research assistants:
Evelyn Madewell joins VSCL as a Ph.D student in the Aerospace Engineering department. She graduated in the Spring of 2024 from the University of Washington with a BS in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering and a Minor in Applied Mathematics. As an undergraduate, she was a research assistant and test pilot in the Autonomous Flight Systems Lab. Her research background includes wilderness search and rescue, hazard aware landing optimization, and beyond visual line of sight operations, which she presented at the 2024 AIAA SciTech Forum. Evelyn has interned with Freefly Systems as a flight test engineer, where she programmed a novel testing procedure for the Astro commercial drone platform, and is currently investigating Sequential Triangulation as a way of solving 3D visual navigation in GPS-denied scenarios with Hood Technology. With her interest in flight test engineering and UAV controls, Evelyn’s work with VSCL will begin by contributing to the Real-time System Identification of UAS project.”
Zach Curtis is graduated from Utah Tech with a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering in 2024. Throughout his undergraduate years, he pursued various internships to broaden his practical experience. At RAM Aviation Space & Defense, he interned within the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) group, the prototyping lab, and the controls engineer group, gaining insights into different facets of mechanical engineering. Additionally, he had the opportunity to intern at Baxter Aerospace, a consulting group, where he worked as a mechanical engineer specializing in designing liquid nitrogen baths for application in nuclear fusion research. Furthermore, during his junior year he engaged in research activities at Utah Tech under the guidance of PhD Monty Kennedy, focusing on Shock and Vibration testing. This involved utilizing the NASA-sponsored Shock Sat testing device to contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the field of shock testing on spacecraft.
Cassie-Kay McQuinn was selected as the recipient of the Stanger Endowed Graduate Fellowship. Established by Dianna Stanger, the fellowship provides academic freedom to selected fellows by providing a portion of their support for two years. The goal of the fellowship is to give students the confidence they need to pursue their dreams regardless of the obstacles that are in their way. The selection process for the fellowship focuses on how the student plans to leverage their Ph.D. toward the greater good and on ways in which the student has shown commitment to advancing women’s participation and inclusion in Aerospace Engineering and other STEM fields.
Cassie-Kay was an active member of Club of Females in Engineering (CAFE) throughout her undergraduate studies. This organization highlights the importance of academic excellence, career development, and providing a community for women studying engineering. As a graduate student she has been actively involved in student mentorship through the VSCL and Sigma Gamma Tau (SGT), where she served as the president in 2022. Cassie-Kay wants to leverage her skill set and experience to bring technology and therefore encouragement to people and students who do not have access to resources or the support to pursue a STEM career.
Cassie-Kay McQuinn graduated with her MS degree in aerospace engineering. Cassie is the 60th graduate student advised to completion of their degree by Dr. Valasek, and the title of her thesis is “Online Near-Real Time Open-Loop System Identification from Closed-Loop Flight Test Data”. This work is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Autonomous Air Mobility & Sensing (CAAMS) as one part of the project “Integration of System Theory with Machine Learning Tools for Data Driven System Identification”. Cassie investigated identifying state-space linear dynamic models generated onboard in near-real time, for vehicles with and without an active flight controller.
Cassie is continuing on to the PhD with VSCL, and her dissertation will be based upon work she has been conducting on STARS (Safe Trusted Autonomy for Responsible Spacecraft) during a year-round internship for the Air Force Research Laboratory.
In conjunction with Dr. Moble Benedict (AVFL Lab – TAMU), Dr Puneet Singla (CASS Lab – Penn State), and Dr. Randy Beard (MAGICC Lab – BYU), Dr. Valasek presented the current updates of the System Identification project at the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAAMS Summer Industry Advisory Board Meeting.
The project “Integration of System Theory with Machine Learning Tools for Data Driven System Identification” integrates system theory with machine learning tools for data driven system identification. The objective is to derive nonlinear dynamical models by employing a unique handshake between linear time varying subspace methods and sparse approximation tools from high fidelity flight simulations and flight experiments.
The center is a partnership between academia, industry, and government to offer pre-competitive research in autonomous air mobility and sensing. Pictured (left to right) are Undergraduate Researcher Halle Vandersloot, PhD student Cassie-Kay McQuinn, Dr. Valasek, and TAMU AERO alum and VP of Engineering of VectorNav Dr. Jeremy Davis.
Dr. John Valasek received two distinguishing awards during the Spring 2024 semester. In the Faculty Excellence Awards category, Valasek was awarded the College of Engineering Teaching Impact Award. This award recognizes individuals who have had a profound impact on students through their teaching. Valasek received the award for the career achievements of his former graduate and undergraduate students.
Valasek was also awarded the Engineering Genesis Award for Multidisciplinary Research. This award was created to honor Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) researchers who have secured a grant of $1 million or more for a research project. Valasek is the PI for the project: “Enhancing the Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems to Facilitate Human-Agent Teaming”.
VSCL hosts Mr. Clay Chen, an entrepreneur interested in UAS systems. Mr. Chen met with VSCL lab director Dr. Valasek and VSCL graduate and undergraduate students to discuss the UAS research and platform developments that VSCL conducts at the flight testing facility.
MD Sunbeam (B.S. Aerospace Engineering, University of Texas) successfully defended his Masters thesis: “Gaze-Regularized Imitation Learning”.
Approaches for teaching learning agents via human demonstrations have been widely studied and successfully applied to multiple domains. However, the majority of imitation learning work utilizes only behavioral information from the demonstrator, i.e. which actions were taken, and ignores other useful information. In particular, eye gaze information can give valuable insight towards where the demonstrator is allocating visual attention, and holds the potential to improve agent performance and generalization. In this work, we propose Gaze Regularized Imitation Learning (GRIL), a novel context-aware, imitation learning architecture that learns concurrently from both human demonstrations and eye gaze to solve tasks where visual attention provides important context. We apply GRIL to a visual navigation task, in which an unmanned quadrotor is trained to search for and navigate to a target vehicle in a photo-realistic simulated environment. We show that GRIL outperforms several state-of-the-art gaze-based imitation learning algorithms, simultaneously learns to predict human visual attention, and generalizes to scenarios not present in the training data.
This work is sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) through the Cycle of Learning Project. MD Sunbeam is employed as a researcher at the Human Research and Engineering Directorate (HRED), ARL.
