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Dr. John Valasek, Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and Director of the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory, gave a virtual seminar titled “Combining Human Demonstrations and Interventions for Safe Training of Autonomous Systems in Real-Time” for the AI Seminar Series hosted by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).  The date of the seminar was 18 August 2021.

Cycle-of-Learning (CoL) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQwsk6kZfok) was presented as a framework using an actor-critic architecture with a loss function that combines behavior cloning and 1-step Q-learning losses with an off-policy pre-training step from human demonstrations.  This enables transition from behavior cloning to reinforcement learning without performance degradation and improves reinforcement learning in terms of overall performance and training time.  This approach is shown to outperform state-of-the-art techniques for combining behavior cloning and reinforcement learning, for both dense and sparse reward scenarios. Results are presented for haptic and eye tracking input modalities, and suggest that directly including the behavior cloning loss on demonstration data helps to ensure stable learning and ground future policy updates.

Kameron Eves, a Ph.D. student in the Vehicle Systems & Control Laboratory (VSCL), has been selected as a 2021-2022 Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) Teaching-as-Research (TAR) Fellow. CIRTL TAR Fellows design and perform an experimental research project about education. Research such as this can help educators adjust their teaching to best help students succeed. Eves’ project proposal seeks to find ways to merge the concepts of active learning and learning styles. These teaching ideas are commonly used in many classrooms, but are seldom used in a complementary way. More specifically, Eves will examine the way question structure can affect participation for students who are usually passive observers in class. The CIRTL TAR Fellowship is competitive. It includes up to $1,000 of funding, and those who publish their work in an academic journal can be awarded a CIRTL Scholar Certificate.

Eves is a second year Aerospace Engineering Ph.D. student with the VSCL. His primary research topic is adaptive control for hypersonic systems. He graduated in 2019 from Brigham Young University in Mechanical Engineering and joined the VSCL immediately after. Eves’ career goals are to join academia and teach at a university. There, he will be able to put into practice many teaching principles such as those to be discovered in this CIRTL TAR project.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Natalie Warnock graduated with her Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering with Summa Cum Laude in May 2021. Warnock has been hired by Bell, Fort Worth, TX.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant Garrett Dorsett graduated with his Bachelor of Science degree in Ocean Engineering in May 2021. Dorsett with be pursuing his Master of Science in Ocean Engineering in Fall 2021.

VSCL is proud to welcome and host Michaela Stratton for the 2021 Undergraduate Summer Research Grant (USRG) Program, where she will be researching Reinforcement Learning for aerospace applications.  Stratton is a rising junior at North Carolina State University currently pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering. She  maintains an interest in Computer Vision, Robotics, and Autonomous Machines. Her research interest began during her freshman year when she  developed a project that she presented at the National Conference of Undergraduate Research. The Research  involved evaluating the viability of using Computer Vision and Machine learning in order to translate American Sign Language(ASL) in real-time.

VSCL is proud to welcome four new Ph.D. graduate research assistants:

Ian Holmes is a Ph.D. student in the aerospace engineering department, and inaugural recipient of the Department of Aerospace Engineering National EXcellence in Aerospace Sciences (NEXAS) Fellowship.  He graduated in May 2021 from the California State University, Long Beach with a B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering with an emphasis in Astronautics. During his undergraduate studies, he spent three years participating in the BUILD program as an NIH-funded research assistant focused on experimental and computational high-speed impact testing. He completed his engineering honors thesis on developing computational strategies using smoothed particle hydrodynamics to simulate bird strike impacts in commercial aviation.

 

 

 

 

MD-Nazmus Sunbeam is a Ph.D. student in the aerospace engineering department. He will graduate in May 2021 from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. degree in aerospace engineering. During his undergraduate studies, Sunbeam worked on making a chess AI by training neural nets through evolutionary algorithms using NEAT. Additionally, he assembled and configured quadcopters, using the drone footage to train object detection neural nets. He has experience implementing convolutional neural nets on different image classification and speech recognition problems. His research interests are AI/ML/robotics. In the fall at VSCL, Sunbeam will research Enhancing the Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems to Facilitate Human-Agent Teaming, which is sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory.

 

 

 

 

Ravi Kumar Thakur is a Ph.D. student in the aerospace engineering department.  His interest is in the field of aerospace robotics and autonomy. He graduated with an MS(Research) degree in Electronics and Communication from the Indian Institute of Information Technology Sri City, Chittoor in 2019. For his thesis, he worked on developing machine learning-based models for estimating scene flow from stereo images. He earned his BS in Engineering Physics from National Institute of Technology Calicut in 2014. In the past, he was a machine learning engineer at Ford Motor Company,  where he worked on driver assistant technology with a focus on visual odometry and object tracking. Before that, he worked at the Indian Institute of science working on the development of an endoscopy simulator. At VSCL, Thakur will be working on the project Enhancing the Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems to Facilitate Human-Agent Teaming which is sponsored by Army Research Laboratory.

 

 

 

David van Wijk is a Ph.D. student in the aerospace engineering department, funded by the College of Engineering Graduate Merit Fellowship. He will graduate in May of 2021 from Cornell University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Sibley school of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. During his undergraduate studies, van Wijk was an active member in the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls under Professor Ferrari, concentrating on classical control for quadrotors, object detection, and mapping. His research contributed to a paper on Visibility-based Directional Sensor Path Planning submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics. He also interned at Northrop Grumman Remotec, focusing on mechanical design of hazardous duty robotic vehicles. He is interested in robotics, autonomous systems, and machine learning.

 

 

 

 

VSCL research on detection and tracking of small uncrewed air systems research was featured in Aerospace America’s 2020 Year in Review. To view the full article, please visit the Aerospace America website here.

VSCL is proud to welcome two new graduate research assistants:

Esteban Gomez is a MEng student in the aerospace engineering department. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University in December 2020. During his time as an undergraduate, Esteban assisted with sensor integration, as well as flight test validation of UAS (unmanned air systems) across multiple VSCL projects. He has been an active member of VSCL since Spring 2019 and will begin working on his masters in January 2021. Esteban’s main interests include flight test engineering, embedded systems, and aircraft dynamics.

 

 

 

 

Christopher Leshikar is a Ph.D. student in the aerospace engineering department.  Chris has been an active member of VSCL since Spring 2017, working on non-linear multiple-time-scale control theory and system identification.  As an undergraduate, he attained internships with the Texas A&M University System Office of Federal Relations and the Defense Intelligence Agency (cancelled due to COVID-19).  Chris graduated with a B.S. in aerospace engineering with Engineering Honors in December 2020.  As a Graduate Research Assistant, he will be researching control of nonlinear multiple time-scale systems, and online near real-time system identification, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

The 50th graduate degree has been earned by a VSCL graduate student. Jin Suzuki earned the first degree, an M.S. in 1997, and Dr. Vinicius Goecks earned the fiftieth degree, a Ph.D. in May 2020. Several VSCL graduates students have earned both the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees during this span, and Dr. Valasek has served as advisor to all 50 degrees. The list of students and dates can be viewed here.

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D. student Garrett Jares has joined the AIAA Aerospace Cybersecurity Working Group (ACWG).  The ACWG is involved with aerospace cybersecurity within the overall vision and mission of AIAA.  It is composed of cybersecurity interested members from across the AIAA and provides opportunities to educate those involved with conceptualization, design, development, testing, deployment, operations, maintenance, and management of aerospace systems. ACWG seeks to engage in active information exchange among those involved in aerospace related cybersecurity, documenting the results, and making those results available to the broader aerospace systems community. The goal of the working group is to enable organizations to improve the confidentiality, integrity and availability of aerospace systems and data.

Garrett is a recipient of the 2020 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, which is supporting his doctoral dissertation on  investigating cyber-attacks designed that are designed to take control of an aircraft by targeting the vehicle’s sensor data.  This research will help identify and better understand the vulnerabilities in current systems and develop safeguards against such attacks.  Garrett is a recipient of the Crawford & Hattie Jackson Foundation Scholarship, the Edward C. Clay ’47 Memorial Scholarship, and the 2018 Lechner Graduate Fellowship.

 

Dr. Dipanjan Saha, a December 2018 Ph.D. graduate of VSCL, has started a new position as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, effective 01 July 2020. Dipanjan has been selected to be part of Northeastern’s newly launched Experiential Artificial Intelligence (EAI) postdoc program. This program is meant to prepare the postdoctoral fellows towards a future career in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) through courses and research. Dipanjan is mentored by Prof. Taskin Padir, and his research will develop novel AI techniques targeted at specific applications including robotics and healthcare. His Ph.D. dissertation investigated novel theories of control design for nonlinear, nonstandard multiple-time-scale systems with uncertainties and output feedback. Prior to his current position, he has pursued postdoctoral research at Texas A&M University on tensegrity systems and uncertainty quantification. He has also been the instructor of record for AERO 321 (Dynamics of Aerospace Vehicles) for three semesters, and a member of the AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Technical Committee.