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PhD students Erin Swansen and Cassie-Kay McQuinn were inducted into AIAA technical committees this year.

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.

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.

Congratulations to the VSCL undergraduate research assistants who graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University on May 10th 2024!

VSCL is proud to welcome two new graduate research assistants:

Erin Swansen joins VSCL as a Ph.D. transfer student in the Aerospace Engineering department. Erin has over five years of experience in industry at Boeing as a guidance, navigation, and control engineer in the Advanced Autonomous Systems group. Her work involved guidance and control system development for a variety of aerial platforms including UAVs, high performance aircraft, and guided weapons. During graduate school, she has interned at NASA and Sandia National Laboratories doing flight control research and development. Her professional and research background includes significant work using robust and adaptive control to address challenges in flight, particularly for hypersonic vehicles. She has also conducted research sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories to develop a new methodology to improve performance of machine learning algorithms for sparse data sets. Her current research interests focus on implementable and verifiable algorithms that allow the safe use of machine learning in guidance and control architectures. Erin earned a B.S. in Systems Science and Engineering and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. With VSCL, Erin will be contributing towards the Center for Autonomous Air Mobility and Sensing (CAAMS) which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

 

Payton Clem is a Master of Science Student in the Aerospace Engineering department. She is graduating from Texas A&M with her Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering with Minors in Mathematics and Astrophysics in Fall 2023. During her undergrad, she was involved in campus activities like working at the Memorial Student Center to provide support to her fellow Aggies, and was a member of P.S.U.N., an on campus organization that provides free programs and events to children with special needs. Finding an interest in research, she worked in Dr. Daniel Selva’s lab, SEAK, on a NASA SBIR project with Aureus Innovation to develop a new systems engineering language. This involved creating a satellite design from scratch using systems engineering diagrams with the SIMPL developing language. Within the SEAK lab she also assisted in developing a rule based planner that would be used in a space mission simulation for space mission design. She was also the project lead of her capstone design group, which provided a satellite constellation design, as well as mission planning software to aid in the solution of an on-orbit servicing problem for L3Harris. As she continued her research, Payton developed an interest into the applications of artificial intelligence within the aerospace engineering field. Payton became a member of VSCL in her senior year, applying her interest in AI by working on the Robust Threat Detection project, research she will continue during her Masters. Her work with VSCL will be primarily focused on Autonomous, Nonlinear Control of Air, Space and Ground Systems.

VSCL is proud to welcome two new graduate research assistants:

Jillian Bennett is a Masters of Science student in the Aerospace Engineering department. She graduated with her Bachelors of Science in Aerospace Engineering and Minor in Mathematics in Fall 2023. As an undergraduate she interned with Los Alamos National Laboratory and TAMU Material Science and Engineering, working on characterizing impacted materials. Additionally she was the lead ambassador for the Aerospace Ambassador program and a Fish Camp chair. Her work with VSCL will be primarily focused on Adaptive Control for Multiple Time Scale Systems.

 

 

 

2nd Lieutenant Noah Luna is a Masters of Science student in the Aerospace Engineering Department. He graduated from the United States Air Force Academy with a Bachelors of Science in Aeronautical Engineering and Computer Science. During his undergraduate studies, he performed research on a neural network based flight control system for an ongoing fixed-wing project through the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL). Additionally, he completed an internship and further research with Lockheed Martin Skunk Works as a Software and Flight Test engineer developing nonlinear adaptive flight controls for aerial systems. At VSCL, Noah will be working on Adaptive Control for Multiple Time Scale Systems.

Kameron Eves, a recently graduated Ph.D. student in the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory (VSCL), has been inducted into the AIAA Intelligent Systems Technical Committee (GNCTC) for 2024.  The GNCTC is a group within AIAA that seeks to advance the technology and provide forums for the theoretical and practical consideration of techniques, devices and systems for the navigation, guidance and control of flight vehicles and the control of related aerospace systems.  Eves was inducted due to his technical experience in nonlinear control.   

Eves’s primary research topic is adaptive control for hypersonic systems in addition to reinforcement learning, autonomous control, and vehicle dynamics.  In the VSCL, Eves also worked to develop the capabilities necessary for autonomous reconnaissance in military settings. This project was a partnership with the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) at Carnegie Mellon University. Eves earned his bachelor’s degree in 2019 from Brigham Young University in Mechanical Engineering and joined the VSCL immediately after.  At BYU, Eves worked in the Multiple Agent Intelligent Coordination and Control (MAGICC) laboratory As part of this research, Kameron helped to develop a ground based optical tracking and imaging system capable of estimating an aircraft’s pose.

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 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.