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VSCL Graduate Research Assistant Vinicius Goecks presented a paper on Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems from Human Interaction at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI-19 on 31 January. Co-authored by researchers from the US Army Research Laboratory’s Human Research and Engineering Directorate, this continuing project investigates how to utilize different forms of human interaction to safely train autonomous systems in real-time by learning from both human demonstrations and interventions. This method improves task completion performance for the same amount of human interaction when compared to learning from demonstrations alone, while also requiring on average 32% fewer data to achieve that performance. This provides evidence that combining multiple modes of human interaction can increase both the training speed and overall performance of policies for autonomous systems. The paper documenting this work is “Efficiently Combining Human Demonstrations and Interventions for Safe Training of Autonomous Systems in Real-Time,” AAAI-2019-6613.

 

VSCL hosted Dr. Jaret Riddick, Director of the Army Research Laboratory, and Dr. Bryan Glaz, Chief Scientist of the Army Research Laboratory at the Texas A&M University UAS Flight Testing Facility at RELLIS Campus.  Dr. Jaret Riddick and Dr. Bryan Glaz spoke with VSCL lab director Dr. John Valasek and VSCL graduate student Vinicius G. Goecks about the work VSCL completes at the flight testing facility and toured the grounds.

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Many students of the Texas A&M Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory have been selected for offsite internships for the Summer of 2018. These internships show VSCL student representation at a variety of companies and institutions across the United States. Students which have been selected for internships in the Summer of 2018 include:

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D. Student Vinicius G. Goecks has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at US Army Research Lab in Aberdeen, MD. Vinicius will be working as a Research Fellow on the US Army initiative to investigate how humans can shape the behavior of autonomous machines driven by learning algorithms. Vinicius has been an active member of VSCL since Spring 2016, focusing on human-machine interaction and the control of UAS with Machine Learning, and the Intelligent Motion Video Target Tracking for UAS.

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant and Master of Engineering Student Emily Fojtik has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at  VectorNav Technologies, Dallas, TX. Emily will be working as a Test Engineer Intern, with a principal focus of automating and expediting the verification and validation of products at VectorNav.  Emily started working with VSCL in the Spring of 2016, with her major roles including managing the Texas A&M University Engineering Flight Simulator and developing a means for evaluating human factors aspects for Head Mounted Displays (HMD) for Enhanced Vision System technologies.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B. S. Aerospace Engineering student Charles Noren has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA. Charles will be working as a Technical Intern at the Autonomy Incubator. He will be performing research on guidance laws and motion planning for autonomous robots. Charles has been an active member of VSCL since Spring 2015, where he has worked on projects including the Shape Memory Alloy Actuator Replacement, the autonomous railroad scout vehicle, and the Intelligent Motion Video Target Tracking for UAS.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B.S. Aerospace Engineering student Blake Krpec has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at Air Tractor, in Olney, TX. Blake will be working as an Aerospace Engineering Intern, where he will be working on developing on board electronic flight systems for production aircraft as well as systems for R&D flights. Blake has been an active member of VSCL since Fall 2016, where he has supported VSCL flight test projects relating to sensor integration and aircraft performance.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B.S. Aerospace Engineering student Hannah Lehman has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, IA. Hannah will be working as a Technical Systems Engineer on the Advanced Concepts team in Commercial Systems. She will be a part a new initiative in the Research and Development of autonomous systems for commercial purposes. Hannah has been an active member of VSCL since Fall 2017, focusing on human-machine interaction and the control of UAS with Machine Learning.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B.S. Aerospace Engineering Student Victoria Nagorski has been selected for a Summer 2018 internship at Northrop Grumman Corporation in Melbourne, FL. Victoria will be working as a Technical Intern to investigate how to write a flight test plan. Victoria has been an active member of VSCL since Fall 2017, where she supports a variety of VSCL UAS flight test projects from aircraft performance test to sensor evaluation.

VSCL Undergraduate Research Assistant and B.S. Aerospace Engineering Student Christopher A. Marcario has been selected for a position at the Texas A&M Cybersecurity Center for calendar year 2018. Chris will be working as an Undergraduate Researcher for the Cyber Spectrum Collaborative Research Environment, which is funded by Air Force Research Laboratory through Clarkson Aerospace, to identify vulnerabilities and demonstrate exploits on civilian unmanned aerial vehicles. Chris has been an active member of VSCL since Spring 2018, focusing on evaluating human factors aspects for head mounted displays for Enhanced Vision System technologies in the Texas A&M University Engineering Flight Simulator.

Congratulations to all who have been selected for internships!

Han-Hsun “Jack” Lu (M.S.  National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan) successfully defended his Master of Science Thesis titled “Online Near Real-Time System Identification on Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems”. Using automated control surface excitation, Lu proposed a method for both constructing a full dynamic system for an UAS and then representing that system in state space form. His method can be used to update the model in flight at the request of a human operator. Congratulations Jack! Thank you for all you have done in the lab. We look forward to hearing about your successes in the future!

VSCL Graduate Research Assistant Han-Hsun “Jack” Lu (M.S.  National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan.) was invited to speak at the GEOSAT seminar series. Lu discussed the different challenges facing engineering and vehicle support for data science collection missions. Talking points included information about the recently concluded precision agriculture missions conducted by VSCL from 2015-2017. A seminar recap was written by GEOSAT and may be found here.

 

The Texas A&M University VSCL and  Land Air Space Robotics Laboratory (LASR) have been subcontracted through Barron Associates to support a new Air Force Research Laboratory program on autonomous aerial refueling of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV).  VSCL has 15 years of experience and a patent on Autonomous Aerial Refueling of UAVs, and together with LASR will provide the UAV simulations, control laws, and sensor selection and modeling.  The Texas A&M University personnel are PI Dr. John Valasek and Co-PI Dr. Majji Manoranjan, both of the Texas A&M University Aerospace Engineering Department.  Working on this project is Master of Engineering student Ezekiel Bowden  (B. S. Aerospace Engineering ‘17, Texas A&M University).