Publications

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.

 

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant Vinicius Goecks will present a paper on “Integrating Behavior Cloning and Reinforcement Learning for Improved Performance in Dense and Sparse Reward Environments” at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems on May 11, 2020. Co-authored by researchers from the US Army Research Laboratory’s Human Research and Engineering Directorate, this continuing project investigates how to efficiently transition and update policies, trained initially with demonstrations,  using off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learning. This method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for combining behavior cloning and reinforcement learning for both dense and sparse reward scenarios. Results also suggest that directly including the behavior cloning loss on demonstration data helps to ensure stable learning and ground future policy updates.

The paper documenting this work, “Integrating Behavior Cloning and Reinforcement Learning for Improved Performance in Dense and Sparse Reward Environments,” is available at the official AAMAS 2020 proceedings, together with the supplemental material detailing the training hyperparameters.

A summary video of the proposed method can be found here, along with the project page that accompanied the paper submission.

The Texas A&M University Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory has had eight papers selected for presentation at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Conference in Kissimmee, Florida. Once paper numbers have been assigned, this post will be updated to reflect the assigned paper numbers.

1. Famularo, Douglas, and Valasek, John,“A Sampled-Data Approach to Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion Adaptive Control,” 2018 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference, Kissimmee, FL, 8 January 2018.
2. Famularo, Douglas, Valasek, John, Muse, Jonathan, and Bolender, Michael, “Adaptive Control of Hypersonic Vehicles Using Observer-Based Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion,” 2018 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference, Kissimmee, FL, 8 January 2018.
3. Goecks, Vinicius, Leal, Pedro, Valasek, John, and Hartl, Darren, “Control of Morphing Wing Shapes with Deep Reinforcement Learning,” 2018 AIAA Information Systems-AIAA Infotech @ Aerospace, AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition, Kissimmee, FL, 8 January 2018.
4. Harris, Joshua, and Valasek, John, “Direct L1-Adaptive Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion Control for Command Augmentation Systems,” 2018 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference, AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition, Kissimmee, FL, 8 January 2018. 
5. Leal, Pedro, Goecks, Vinicius, Valasek, John, and Hartl, Darren, “Experimental and Computational Assessment of a Shape Memory Alloy Based Morphing Wing Incorporating Linear and Non-Linear Control, 2018 AIAA/AHS Adaptive Structures Conference, AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition, Kissimmee, FL, 8 January 2018.
6. Lu, Han Hsun, Rogers, Cameron, Goecks, Vinicius, and Valasek, John, “Online Near Rear Time System Identification on a Fixed-Wing Small Unmanned Air Vehicle,” 2018 AIAA Atmospheric Flight Mechanics Conference, AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition, Kissimmee, FL, 8 January 2018.
7. Noren, Charles, Valasek, John, and Rogers, Cameron, “Flight Testing of Intelligent Motion Video Guidance for Unmanned Air System Ground Target Surveillance ,” 2018 AIAA Information Systems-AIAA Infotech @ Aerospace, AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition, Kissimmee, FL, 8 January 2018.
8. Saha, Dipanjan, Valasek, John, Famularo, Douglas, and Reza, Mohammad, “Combined Longitudinal and Lateral/Directional Maneuvers of a Generic F-16A Using Multiple-Time-Scale Control,” 2018 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference, Kissimmee, FL, 8 January 2018.