Awards

Hannah Lehman ‘20, a senior in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and an undergraduate research assistant of the Texas A&M Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, has accepted a Graduate Research Fellowship and will join the Ph.D. program in aerospace engineering in Fall 2020.  Dr. John Valasek will serve as her research Advisor and Chair of dissertation committee.  As a Graduate Research Assistant Hannah will research Tightly Integrated Navigation and Guidance for Multiple Autonomous Agents, which is sponsored by Sandia National Laboratory.  She will also do a 2020 summer internship at Sandia National Laboratory.

Hannah has been an active member of VSCL since Fall 2017, focusing on human-machine interaction and the control of UAS with Machine Learning.  She will graduate with the B.S. degree in aerospace engineering as a University Scholar, University Honors, and Engineering Honors in May 2020.  She has been awarded the 2019/2020 AIAA Foundation Cary Spitzer Digital Avionics Scholarship, the 2019 Gathright Phi Kappa Phi Outstanding Junior in the College of Engineering, and placed 1^st in the 2018 AIAA Region IV Student Paper Conference.   

Blake Krpec, a master’s student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and graduate research assistant of the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, has been awarded the Journeyman Fellowship by the Army Research Lab (ARL).  It is presented to a graduate student interested in combining computer vision and control techniques. Specifically, this fellowship is intended to investigate forms of vision based control that will enable UAS (unmanned air systems) to autonomously navigate relative to another UAS that has been detected.  “Attempts have been made to address this problem, however they fell short of being able to track a target in real time, or were so computationally expensive that image classification and control techniques had to be computed off-board and sent to the vehicle via some wireless communication method. This use of a more powerful computer on the ground introduces strict infrastructure restrictions on the real world implementation of the solution. Our approach aims to perform all necessary computations on board the vehicle so that our solution could be implemented almost anywhere,” says Blake. “I would like to think Dr. John Valasek for supporting my pursuit of this fellowship, and supporting my research interest in this field. Also, I would like to think the Army Research Laboratory for presenting me with this opportunity, welcoming me on its facilities, and for funding this work.”

Blake has been working with his advisor, Dr. John Valasek, since the fall semester of his sophomore year (Fall 2016) as an undergraduate research assistant assisting in flight test validation of UAS, as well as the integration of various sensors and on board computers. He has earned his B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University in May 2019 and began working on his masters in August 2019. Blake’s main research interests include computer vision, controls using computer vision, and traditional controls applied to unmanned air systems.

Hannah Lehman ‘20, a senior in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and an undergraduate research assistant of the Texas A&M Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, has been awarded the AIAA Foundation Cary Spitzer Digital Avionics Scholarship for the 2019/2020 academic year.  She is being recognized for her outstanding academic record and her research contributions in Reinforcement Learning for the intelligent control of Unmanned Air Systems.  The scholarship is awarded annually to a college student in good academic standing who is pursuing a degree in aerospace engineering, or aeronautical engineering.

Hannah was recognized as the 2019 Gathright Phi Kappa Phi Outstanding Junior in the College of Engineering.  Each year, the deans in each college are asked to select the most outstanding student from among all the juniors in their respective colleges based on research and/or creative production, community engagement, accomplishments/awards, and academic record, with the final selection criteria determined by the dean of each respective college.  Named in honor of the first president of the A&M College of Texas, it was established in April 1973 by The Association of Former Students in conjunction with Texas A&M’s Student Government Association.  As of Spring 2019, this award has become a collaboration between The Association of Former Students, LAUNCH: Academic Excellence, and the Texas A&M chapter of Phi Kappa Phi and has been renamed the “Gathright Phi Kappa Phi Outstanding Junior” award.

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 elected the chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Intelligent Systems Technical Committee (ISTC).

The ISTC addresses the application of Intelligent System (IS) technologies and methods to aerospace systems, the verification and validation of these systems, and the education of the AIAA membership in the use of IS technologies in aerospace and other technical disciplines.

Please see the full announcement by Jan McHarg on the Texas A&M College of Engineering website, here: https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2019/01/valasek-elected-chair-of-aiaa-intelligent-systems-technical-committee.html 

Dr. John Valasek

On September 28^th and 29^th, members of the Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory participated in the MD5 & Army Futures Command A-Hack-of-the-Drones event where developers were tasked with coming together to explore “non-traditional, innovative methods to counter sUAS.” There were four major areas of focus for the hackathon:

• Detection – sUAS operating in a waypoint mode
• Cyber Effects – undetected exploitation of sUAS systems and operators
• Nullification – sUAS ability to perform a task without destroying the system
• Elimination – eliminate a sUAS threat

We are proud to announce that the “A” Team, a multidisciplinary group of engineers from Texas A&M University and the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), was one of three teams that won the A-Hack-of-the-Drones hackathon and were awarded $15,000 to continue developing their ideas in partnership with MD5.

As the Texas A&M University Aerospace Engineering Department reports in the official announcement by Jan McHarg, found here:

“The “A” Team’s inspiration came from the major concern shared by both the United States and its allies like South Korea that the growing ubiquity of low-cost sUAS allows anyone with one of these devices to enter regions of civil or military interest and wreak havoc in ways unimaginable. Their belief was that it was of prime importance for agencies engaged in national security to be capable of detecting and tracking these devices to better protect the interests of those they serve.”

Three graduate student VSCL team members participated on the “A” Team and contributed their unique skills and understanding of sUAS and machine learning to the development of the “A”-team’s computer vision target-tracking solution. The three team members are:

• Emily Fojtik
• Vinicius G. Goecks
• Garrett Jares

We are very proud of all the VSCL team members who participated in the hackathon and the “A” Team as a whole. We look forward to hearing about the continued development of your solution in the future.

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 selected as the 2017-18 inductee into the University of Kansas Aerospace Engineering Honor Roll for his national contributions to Unmanned Air Systems (UAS). This award is given annually and recognizes alumni and other friends of the aerospace engineering department who have made major contributions to the aerospace engineering profession. Members of the honor roll serve in perpetuity as role models for aerospace engineering students and the public at large.

Please see the full announcement by Jan McHarg on the Texas A&M College of Engineering website, here: https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2018/08/valasek-honored-by-university-of-kansas-for-unmanned-air-systems-contributions.html

Joshua Harris, a December 2017 graduate from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and a graduate research assistant of the Texas A&M Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory, has been awarded the 2018 Association of Former Students Distinguished Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Research  in the Masters category. He defended his master’s thesis titled “Nonlinear Adaptive Inversion Control for Variable Stability Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems” in October 2017, and he is being recognized for his outstanding academic record and contributions in aerospace engineering by a distinguished committee of reviewers.

Please see the full announcement by Jan McHarg on the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station website, here: “Harris recognized for research excellence at national and university levels”

Joshua Harris (B.S. Aerospace Engineering ‘14, Texas A&M University) was selected by the College of Engineering as the recipient of the 2017-2018 Outstanding Engineering Master of Science Graduate Student Award, out of a total of 1,134 currently enrolled MS students in the College of Engineering.

This award was created to recognize current graduate students who have demonstrated excellence above and beyond usual levels of achievement for their field.  Candidates are evaluated by faculty in the College of Engineering on the basis of scholastic achievements, leadership, service and character.  Recipients receive a commemorative memento of recognition and a monetary award of $5,000 as a one-time scholarship. 

Joshua is a graduate research assistant in VSCL since his freshman year and has contributed to essentially every research program since that time.  He has been working with his advisor, Dr. John Valasek, for six years.  Harris earned bachelor’s in aerospace engineering Summa Cum Laude from Texas A&M in 2014. He is a recipient of the National Defense Science Engineering Graduate Fellowship, the NASA Aeronautics Scholarship, the FAA PEGASAS Center of Excellence Outstanding Student Researcher Award, and the Sigma Gamma Tau Outstanding Texas A&M University Aerospace Engineering Senior for 2014. Harris is currently a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Intelligent Systems Technical Committee. This semester he will be defending his master’s thesis “Nonlinear Adaptive Inversion Control for Variable Stability Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems”.  He has accepted a position as a Software Engineer with the Flight Control/VMS Group at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company in Fort Worth, TX.