Awards

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 Northrop Grumman Aeronautics Systems in San Diego, CA.

Bowers defended her M.S thesis titled “Estimation Algorithm For Autonomous Aerial Refueling Utilizing A Vision Based Relative Navigation System,” in April 2005 and then joined Northrop Grumman.

VSCL Undergraduate researcher Alexander Gross ‘23 is the recipient of the AIAA Foundation Cary Spitzer Digital Avionics Scholarship for his research contributions on the Aided Threat Recognition from Mobile Cooperative and Autonomous Sensors project and in applications of the Cycle-of-Learning methodology for training of Mars rover vehicles and their interaction with human operators. He is currently working towards his bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering with minors in Computer Science and Mathematics while in Engineering Honors. He has been conducting research in the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory under Dr. Valasek since his sophomore year.

VSCL alumni Tiffany Williamson and Felix Turcios and current VSCL Ph.D. student Hannah Lehman are co-inventors on newly awarded US Patent 11,037,455, “Autonomous judgmental oversteering determination system for aircraft taxiing”. The system uses reinforcement learning  to create a system 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.

Tiffany Williamson and Felix Turcios currently work at Collins Aerospace in Cedar Rapids Iowa as an Engineering Leader and Sr. Systems Engineer respectively. Hannah Lehman is a former Collins Aerospace summer intern with Tiffany and Felix in the Advanced Concepts Group. The team is expecting one more patent for the autonomous taxiing user interface in conjunction with this project.

Click here to view the patent.

Chris Leshikar ’20, a graduate research assistant in the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory (VSCL), has been awarded the PhD Graduate Excellence Fellowship for Spring/Summer 2021. This competitive fellowship awards $20,000 over the span of 8 months , in addition to covering tuition and fees. All graduate research assistants within the department of aerospace engineering pursuing a PhD starting in Spring 2021 were considered for this Fellowship.

Leshikar has been an active member of VSCL since Spring 2017, focusing on system identification and nonlinear multiple-time-scale control theory. He graduated with a B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering with Engineering Honors in December 2020. As a graduate research assistant in VSCL, Leshikar will be focusing his research on control of uncertain nonlinear multiple-time-scale systems and near real-time online system identification. Dr. John Valasek will serve as his research Advisor and Chair of dissertation committee.

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 inducted into the Engineering Hall of Fame, College of Engineering, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Valasek was one of nine engineering alumni so honored.  The college’s Hall of Fame recognizes, honors, and preserves the outstanding accomplishments and contributions of alumni engineers and engineering technologists who have distinguished themselves in the community through leadership and professional achievement. From helping usher in the era of digital television to guiding the development of California’s most recognizable structures, each inductee has made meaningful contributions deserving of honor and preservation.

Valasek graduated with the B.S. degree in aerospace engineering from Cal Poly, Pomona in 1986.  While a student at Cal Poly he served as Chairman of the AIAA Student Branch, and was the Student Chairman of the 1985 AIAA Region VI Student Paper Conference.  He worked part-time during his senior year in the Flight Controls Research Group at Northrop Corporation, Aircraft Division, before joining that group at Northrop upon graduation.

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 appointed to the Dean’s Leadership Board (DLB) of the College of Engineering, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The DLB is an advisory board of high-level executives that bring their expertise and knowledge in their respective engineering fields. This group of alumni and industry experts secure resources for the college and to help define its strategies and goals.

 

Valasek graduated with the B.S. degree in aerospace engineering from Cal Poly, Pomona in 1986.  While a student at Cal Poly he served as Chairman of the AIAA Student Branch, and was the Student Chairman of the 1985 AIAA Region VI Student Paper Conference.  He worked part-time during his senior year in the Flight Controls Research Group at Northrop Corporation, Aircraft Division, before joining that group at Northrop upon graduation.

VSCL paper “Combining Visible and Infrared Spectrum Imagery using Machine Learning for Small Unmanned Aerial System Detection”, by Vinicius G. Goecks, Grayson Woods, and John Valasek, has been selected as the winner of the 2020 SPIE Automatic Target Recognition Best Student Paper Award. This paper presented a novel approach to combine data from RGB and long-wave infrared (LWIR) cameras to detect drones through previously difficult environments such as flying above and below the treeline/horizon, in the presence of birds, and glare from the sun.

“The main insight of our approach is that it enables detection and tracking of vehicles at any time of the day, around-the-clock, and in real-time.” says Dr. Goecks. “It also can be built on top of any existing camera system with minimal computation overhead.”

A summary video of the system can be found here, along with videos with all predictions for the single-vehicle case and multiple-vehicle case.

The paper was presented at the 2020 SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing Conference Digital Forum held 27 April – 8 May 2020. The paper is available at the SPIE Digital Library and the preprint version is available at arXiv.