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Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering

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search.filters.applied.f.advisor: Feron, Eric × search.filters.applied.f.advisor: Vamvoudakis, Kyriakos G. × End date: 2022 × Start date: 2020 × search.filters.applied.f.isOrgUnitOfPublicationTitle: College of Engineering ×

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The design, education and evolution of a robotic baby

2022-12-13 , Zhu, Hanqing

Inspired by Alan Turing’s idea of a child machine, I introduce the formal definition of a robotic baby, an integrated system with minimal world knowledge at birth, capable of learning incrementally and interactively, and adapting to the world. Within the definition, fundamental capabilities and system characteristics of the robotic baby are identified and presented as the system-level requirements. As a minimal viable prototype, the Baby architecture is proposed with a systems engineering design approach to satisfy the system-level requirements, which has been verified and validated with simulations and experiments on a robotic system. The capabilities of the robotic baby are demonstrated in natural language acquisition and semantic parsing in English and Chinese, as well as in natural language grounding, natural language reinforcement learning, natural language programming and system introspection for explainability. Furthermore, the education and evolution of the robotic baby are illustrated with real-world robotic demonstrations. Inspired by the genetic inheritance in human beings, knowledge inheritance in robotic babies and its benefits regarding evolution are discussed.

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Versatile and structurally efficient aerial systems assembled from polyhedral rotorcraft modules

2022-05-03 , Garanger, Kevin

Autonomous multirotor vehicles have become widespread tools for many industries. They are used to perform tasks for a fraction of the cost than the traditional methods they supplant and with greater safety. Most payloads carried by drones for current applications are sensors used to gather data in otherwise hard-to-reach places or over large distances or areas quickly. Cargo transportation via autonomous drones is also being explored by several companies, as a mean to provide fast last-mile delivery, for intra-logistics, or to serve remote locations. A few companies have already demonstrated the usefulness of drones to deliver emergency medical supplies to places isolated from transportation networks. The wide variety of drone payloads, from today's numerous sensors to tomorrow's airlifted supplies, and the tight performance envelope of electrically powered platforms result in a myriad of purpose-built vehicles. Modular, reconfigurable autonomous vehicles that can adapt to diverse payloads have been proposed as a replacement of conventional systems for greater flexibility of operations. Because of the necessity to limit interactions between rotors, prior art has been mostly defined by modules that assemble in a horizontal plane.This assembly rule inevitably leads to a decrease in stiffness of vehicles as they grow in size and to several related issues. Novel modular rotorcraft designs and assembly schemes based on polyhedral modules intended to remedy these limitations are explored in this thesis. Structural and dynamical properties of the introduced modular vehicles are studied. In particular, these properties are characterized in a way making the determination of optimal vehicle configurations possible with efficient algorithms. Multiple modular configurations with different capabilities are studied as examples in this thesis. Finally, several prototypes that were designed, fabricated, and flown are presented.

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Optimization-based design of fault-tolerant avionics

2021-12-13 , Khamvilai, Thanakorn

This dissertation considers the problem of improving the self-consciousness for avionic systems using numerical optimization techniques, emphasizing UAV applications. This self-consciousness implies a sense of awareness for oneself to make a reliable decision on some crucial aspects. In the context of the avionics or aerospace industry, those aspects are SWaP-C as well as safety and reliability. The decision-making processes to optimize these aspects, which are the main contributions of this work, are presented. In addition, implementation on various types of applications related to avionics and UAV are also provided. The first half of this thesis lays out the background of avionics development ranging from a mechanical gyroscope to a current state-of-the-art electronics system. The relevant mathematics regarding convex optimization and its algorithms, which will be used for formulating this self-consciousness problem, are also provided. The latter half presents two problem formulations for redundancy design automation and reconfigurable middleware. The first formulation focuses on the minimization of SWaP-C while satisfying safety and reliability requirements. The other one aims to maximize the system safety and reliability by introducing a fault-tolerant capability via the task scheduler of middleware or RTOS. The usage of these two formulations is shown by four aerospace applications---reconfigurable multicore avionics, a SITL simulation of a UAV GNC system, a modular drone, and a HITL simulation of a fault-tolerant distributed engine control architecture.

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