181-190 of 217 results
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Learning from Zombie Ants to Increase UAV Swarm Resilience to Faulted Agents
PI Bryan Watson
This proposal examines the issue of faulted-agent mitigation through the lens of Biologically Inspired Design.
Modern aerospace systems often approach problems by connecting many smaller agents, rather than using a single, more expensive platform. For example, it is often advantageous to have a fleet of lower-cost UAVs searching an area than a single, highly capable platform (airship). These sophisticated networks, however, are vulnerable to cascading faults. For example, errors in data from a single UAV could lead the entire search party away from their intended target. Although recognized as a vulnerability for multi-agent systems, current fault-mitigation methods have significant limitations. Centralized monitoring methods are too computationally expensive and do not work well at large scale, while solutions that rely on agents reporting their own failures may not work in situations where the units are under attack or experiencing certain types of faults (e.g. communication failures). Additionally, current approaches often have strict assumptions that may not apply in real-world systems. As a result, large-scale aerospace systems are at risk of individual agent failures that can spread throughout the entire network, causing problems with system operation, and putting personnel in danger. This proposal examines the issue of faulted-agent mitigation through the lens of Biologically Inspired Design. The objective of this research is to investigate and evaluate a new biologically inspired approach to increase multi-agent system resilience. The Ophiocordyceps camponoti-rufipedis (OCR) or Zombie Ant Fungus provides an example of fault resilience in nature. The fungus infects the ant's nervous system and alters their behavior, ultimately leading to death. However, ant colonies have developed a unique foraging and organizational structure that contains the spread of the fungus. The central hypothesis is that an examination of colony response to OCR will allow derivation of information sharing protocols to increase multi-agent system resilience to fault propagation.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Navigation and Control for Autonomous Vessels
PI Darris White
PI Eric Coyle
PI Patrick Currier
Development of closed-form solution for control of over-actuated maritime systems.
A method for controlling the position, orientation and velocity of a marine vessel in a body of water with multiple, independently steered propulsion devices. The method involves receiving a command to move to a specific position and orientation. Utilizing position/heading feedback control, a control algorithm is used to calculate the required forces and moments to move the vehicle. Steering angles and thrust forces are determined for each of the vessel's propulsion devices. The thrust and angular displacement limits of each device are used to determine if the required forces and moments are achievable using one of three modes of operation: parallel steer, counter steer and combined parallel/counter steer. The approach fully utilizes the solution workspace for the over-actuated system without requiring the use of an optimization. The approach is used for smooth autonomous navigation in scenarios that include station keeping, path following, transitional states, disturbance rejection and object avoidance.Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Research and update SSCP Study Guide to 3d Edition
PI Michael Wills
Research current cybersecurity industry best practices, threat intelligence, and regulatory requirements, as part of publisher update for (ISC)2 Systems Security Certified Professional Study Guide, 3d Edition
Extensively revise the previous (2nd Edition) of this study guide to reflect cutting-edge best practices across the information security / cybersecurity market spaces. Research to support new content for operational technology (OT) security issues -- for IoT, process control, autonomous devices, smart buildings and vehicles, and even medical implants. Focus this on the security issues of IT-OT systems integrations, becoming far more commonplace in modern business in most industries. Adapt this to self-paced learning and ready reference format required in a study guide for individual and classroom use.Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Experimental Academics in Action at ERAU (EAA-at-ERAU)
PI Michael Wills
EAA@ERAU: IMAGINE an Experimental Academic Approach that puts academic experimentation into action in ways that attract and engage both existing students AND prospective students, students who want to join us in blazing a new trail, finding a new way to look at a tried-and-true topic.
This project, inspired by my current activities as an Academic Innovation Research (AIR) Fellow, recognizes that it's all well and good to develop and trial innovative teaching, class design, or assessment techniques in a handful of classes; but it's quite another to get prospective students to come to ERAU, take such new and different courses, and have all benefit from the experiences.
What's Needed: More of an experimental, "Skunk Works" life cycle approach to innovation in teaching.
SUBMITTED as a proposal to the Academic Innovation 2023 Virtual Conference, Rothwell Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence.
CONCEPT:
Throughout the history of aviation, the "experimental mindset" has been the driving force behind the development of new approaches and ideas. Experimenters have transformed aviation time and time again. Clearly, the vast majority of flights are anything but experimental; those flights have business needs to attend to, or mission objectives to accomplish.
But that "test pilot" mindset, that experimenter view, is alive and well throughout the aviation and aerospace community across the world. And the notion of going to an Experimental Aircraft Association Fly-In event, like at Oshkosh, WI, excites every one of us.
We at ERAU know this; it's in our blood.
We just don't do this very well, if at all, with our classes or our teaching. Okay, yes, a few of us do innovate around the edges; we tweak approaches and try new tools and new techniques.
Which none of our students ever find out BEFORE they walk into our classrooms, virtual or physical.
IMAGINE an Experimental Academic Approach, that puts academic experimentation into action, in ways that attract the attention of both existing students AND prospective students, students who want to join us in blazing a new trail, finding a new way to look at a tried-and-true topic.
An EAA strategy for Worldwide needs to gently touch many different aspects of many different business processes here at Worldwide; processes that must be rock-solid, well-oiled and well-scaled for our production, mainline course deliveries, term after term.
As a concept exploration and demonstration, this project will build on the AIR Fellows Program's approach to having a small handful of innovative "pilot" courses ready to launch in the coming calendar year as context, feasibility study, and as the test case to show that an EAA strategy is necessary (but not sufficient) for such innovations to have a chance of success.
Challenging many of the conventional wisdom factors about the "current" "best" ways of doing our business of course development, production, teaching, and assessment, by placing those within a messaging strategy that disrupts hearts and minds without requiring a full-scale disruption of existing business, marketing, outreach, enrollment, advising, course production, teaching, and assessment processes.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Academic Innovation Research Fellowship Grant: Scaling Up the Academic Integrity Vaccine Toolkit
PI Michael Wills
Empirical evaluation of class design techniques that empower students to take creative, active, agile ownership of their learning, thus auto‐immunizing against accidental or deliberate academic integrity issues; scalable as a toolkit by other instructors in other disciplines across ERAU
This project, funded by ERAU's AIR Fellowship Program, builds on several years of rapid prototyping and use of different innovative techniques, applied in different ways, in various courses that I have been teaching for ERAU over the past several years. Activity by activity, these flight tests of specific techniques illuminated the central concept of this project: that a better design approach for classroom activities, supported in agile ways by the instructor, can deliver four primary student-centric benefits:
- Liberate student creativity -- turning them loose to creatively build their own problems, develop their own solutions, and test those solutions
- Concretely make the learning relevant to the students, grounded in reality
- Leading to increased feelings of empowerment by students, and of ownership of their own learning processes
- And have so much more fun while they’re doing it, that they simply have no incentive and many emotional disincentives to cheat, cut corners, or under-achieve
Note the natural knock-on effect of these benefits on the faculty member: as students become more engaged with their learning, own their learning, and thereby reduce their potential for over-reliance on learning by copying (instead of critical reading for comprehension), they reduce the instructor’s time and effort spent chasing potential academic integrity violation (AIV) issues. As students have more fun doing better quality work, the instructor should be able to better enjoy the evaluation, feed-forward, and assessment aspects of their duties.
These benefits amount to an inoculation or immunization of students that helps prevent them from committing academic integrity violations, for whatever reason; in doing so, this inoculation (or “creativity megavitamin treatment”) may also light fires under a student’s desires to create work that they want to be proud of, and can and should be proud of.
The Academic Integrity Vaccine Toolkit (AIVT) refers to a set of design paradigms, frameworks, or models which encourage and support the development, deployment, and teaching of courses that target this goal.
Project Plan
This Project proposes to further develop these assertions so that they can be adopted and adapted by other faculty members into their own teaching and learning experiences. This will be accomplished by the following set of tasks:
Task 1.Inventory, characterize, and assess early prototyping trials. I will go through classes I have taught during the last two years (approximate) in which I deployed and used one or more of the techniques I have been trialing in this regard. Characterization would, for example, attempt to identify whether a particular element was best suited for supporting foundational or prerequisite knowledge and skills development, guided inquiry, advanced concepts, or in other ways, as the data may suggest. I will continue to enrich this data set from lessons learned from my ongoing teaching throughout the AY.
Task 2.Identifying candidate “meta-models” of AIVT elements. This seeks to develop a consistent meta-description of such elements, to facilitate their development as containerized, redeployable courseware elements.
Task 3.Focused, limited query and research as needed, when aspects of the project need greater support from either a theoretical or a practical perspective.
Task 4.Curating and hosting the Project, its concepts, frameworks, paradigms, and the AIVT, in a fashion that facilitates sharing, collaboration, and use by other ERAU faculty members as and when appropriate. Notionally, this would be in a newly-created Canvas course that I would build and use for this purpose.
Expected Impacts.
At the individual level, I see the project as making my own style of renovate-as-I-teach more scalable and sustainable. It will provide me with better mental models and concepts for how I go about my preparation for teaching each new class; its toolkits and elements should make my job of tuning, pruning, updating, or pivoting activities within each class I teach, each time I teach it, easier and more repeatable.
The experience of this project will also give me greater insight as to whether these concepts, ideas, tactics, and techniques have subject domain – specific characteristics of note.
Sharing these findings and experiences with the broader ERAU faculty and course design communities can lead to many benefits:
- Improved student engagement leads to greater student success
- Faculty engagement with students becomes more enjoyable as it becomes more supportive and effective
- As courses become more agile, an academic discipline or degree program can be more agile and responsive in meeting rapidly-evolving real-world situations
- All of which can enhance the University’s reputation, standing, effectiveness, and enrollments.
And Then What? Even a modest, partial success with some of the elements of this project can provide the seeds for a variety of subsequent projects and activities; all of which can (I posit) build on a better-informed baseline of insight derived from the experiences to date of teaching and learning using these or similar innovation tactics here at ERAU.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Update content and teaching design, CISSP Official Training Course, to meet 2021 best security practices
PI Michael Wills
Research, curate, and redevelop all course materials to meet 2021 best cybersecurity practices and certification requirements for (ISC)2 Certified Information Systems Security Professional program
Lead subject matter expert on this project, which fully rewrote all course materials (1100+ pgs, 1200+ slides and other materials) to bring (ISC)2's flagship certification program up to current (2021) exam certification needs, industry best practice, and current and evolving information security threat. Collaborated with five other subject matter experts, curating findings drawn from over 200 industry, government, and research sources. Redesigned content flow and structure to establish clarity and consistency in scaffolding, voice, presentation, and ease of use.Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Research, Curate, Update content and teaching design, SSCP Official Training Course, to meet 2021 best security practices
PI Michael Wills
Research, curate, and redevelop all course materials to meet 2021 best cybersecurity practices and certification requirements for (ISC)2 Systems Security Certified Professional program
Subject matter expert on this project, which fully rewrote all course materials (900+ pgs and other materials) to bring (ISC)2's foundational information systems security certification program up to current (2021) exam certification needs, industry best practice, and current and evolving information security threat. Consulted with technical reviewer and other subject matter experts as I curated findings drawn from over 200 industry, government, and research sources. Redesigned content flow and structure to establish clarity and consistency in scaffolding, voice, presentation, and ease of use.Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Usability of Urban Air Mobility: Quantitative and Qualitative Assessments of Usage in Emergency Situations
PI Scott Winter
CO-I Stephen Rice
CO-I Sean Crouse
The purpose of these studies is to determine the usability of urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles in the emergency response to natural disasters and the ideal locations for their take-off and landing sites to occur, consistent with the Center's Theme 2. UAM involves aerial vehicles, mostly operated autonomously, which can complete short flights around urban areas, although their applications are expanding to rural operations as well. While initially designed to support advanced transportation mobility, these vehicles could offer numerous advantages in the emergency response to natural disasters. Through a series of four studies with over 2,000 total participants, quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to identify UAM vehicles' usability in response to natural disasters. The studies will examine the types of natural disasters and types of missions where UAM could be considered usable, along with the creation of a valid scale to determine vertiport usability. Interviews will also be conducted to provide qualitative insights to complement the quantitative findings.
In this proposed series of four studies, our overall purpose will be to determine the usability of urban air mobility in the emergency response to natural disasters. As the concepts of urban air mobility move closer to reality, these mostly autonomous aerial vehicles may provide valuable contributions to our response after natural disasters. However, little prior research has examined the types of natural disasters, types of missions, or locations where UAM could be deployed in the emergency response. The first objective of this research will be to assess the usability of UAM based on the type of natural disaster and type of mission. Following this, the research will develop a valid scale to measure possible locations where UAM operations could be conducted following a natural disaster, such as city parks, building rooftops, or existing helipads. The final objective of this study will be to gather qualitative data through interviews to complement the quantitative findings and offer more significant insights and explanations as to the usability of UAM in response to natural disasters.Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Integrated Communication and Environmental Sensing for Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems
PI Thomas Yang
PI Siyao Li
Current communication networks with transmitter/receiver nodes can provide large-scale area coverage and robust interconnection between nodes. This allows for the seamless integration of sensing functions into the existing communication framework, paving the way for Integrated Communication and Sensing (ICAS). Unlike previous generations that treated communication and sensing separately, ICAS eliminates the need for additional hardware, extra transmit power, or dedicated frequency bands, by enabling communication signals to support data transmission and environmental sensing simultaneously. This convergence makes ICAS a key feature of six-generation (6G) communication and enables advanced applications, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) missions, autonomous driving, surveillance, and smart cities, to be powered by a single transmitted signal.
This project aims to develop a novel ICAS framework tailored specifically for autonomous systems operating in safety-critical environments. The primary focus is enabling environment sensing by systematically analyzing the received information-carrying communication signals, through line-of-sight and/or reflected and scattered paths.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Intelligent signal processing for secure mobile wireless communications with spectrum and energy efficiency
PI Thomas Yang
In modern wireless communications, scenarios often arise in which the receiver is required to perform detection of multi-user transmissions on the same channel or suppress co-channel interferers. In these scenarios, signal separation techniques based on statistical properties can be highly effective.
In modern wireless communications, scenarios often arise in which the receiver is required to perform detection of multi-user transmissions on the same channel or suppress co-channel interferers. In these scenarios, signal separation techniques based on statistical properties can be highly effective. However, for wireless systems operating in highly dynamic environments (such as mobile and vehicular communications), the rapidly time-varying channel condition remains a major challenge for block-based signal processing, in which the estimation of statistical properties is performed through averaging over a block of data samples. When the channel parameters change with time, long blocks mean substantial variation of mixing matrices within each block, which inevitably degrades the source separation performance. On the other hand, short blocks render the estimation of signals’ statistical properties inaccurate and biased, thus resulting in poor estimation performance.
We addresses the above-mentioned challenge via the adoption of signal separation algorithms specifically designed for dynamic channel conditions, and artificial data injection applied to short processing data blocks in wireless receivers. Through theoretical and simulation studies, we concluded that the data injection method has great potential in improving signal detection accuracy and/or processing speed for multi-user detection in wireless receivers under dynamic channel conditions. The physical layer security of these mobile communication systems is also being addressed. The research is supported by Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate (AFRL/RI).
Categories: Faculty-Staff
181-190 of 217 results