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.
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.
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 
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 
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 
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 
) 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.
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.
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.