41-50 of 225 results
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Exploration: Aerospace Student-Teacher Program for Innovation, Research, and Education (ASPIRE)
PI Samantha Bowyer
CO-I Ronnie Mack
Aerospace Student-Teacher Program for Innovation, Research, and Education (ASPIRE) aims to provide high school students and educators with the opportunity to immerse themselves in experiential learning in the scientific environments and receive mentorship from trained scientists.
ASPIRE program aims to strengthen the future of advanced manufacturing in aircraft and air mobility where 100 high school students across three to four schools per year (total 11 different high schools in 3 years) and 100 educators will be engaged per year. Among the high school students, 20 students will be selected and involved in an eight-week summer interdisciplinary research program (SKY-CARE: Summer Program for High School Youth in Career Aerospace, Aviation, and Research Education) with dedicated mentors from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU). Among the 100 educators, 20 educators will be given a classroom supplies grant to provide experiential learning activities to their students.Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Student Perceptions of Pilot Pathway Programs and Motivation to Join
PI Lauren Burmester
CO-I Becky Lutte
This study seeks to explore what motivates university students to join airline pathway programs, their perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks, and how these perceptions can inform strategies to enhance program effectiveness and increase participation.
The research will be conducted in two phases. The first phase, supported by the College of Aviation's Strategic Initiative Grant, involved a comprehensive literature review and the development of a survey instrument and interview protocol. The second phase, supported by the FIRST Grant, employed a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews to gain a deeper understanding of student decision-making. Participants include university students enrolled in aviation flight programs, with a target sample of 200 survey respondents and 10-15 interviewees. Data collection involved online structured questionnaires, distributed via Qualtrics, and in-depth interviews to explore personal experiences and expectations.
Quantitative data will be analyzed using statistical techniques, including descriptive statistics and chi-square tests, while qualitative data will undergo thematic analysis. A comparative analysis will identify differences in perceptions between participants and non-participants of pathway programs. The findings will provide valuable insights into student motivations and inform strategies to maximize the impact of these programs, addressing the broader challenges facing the aviation workforce. Key deliverables will include a literature review, an annotated bibliography, a survey instrument, an interview protocol, and recommendations for further research funding and presentation at an industry conference. The final manuscript will be submitted to a peer-reviewed academic journal, with results presented at an industry conference.Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Developing and 3D Printing sUAS Fixed-Wing Aircraft for Educational Use
PI Joseph Cerreta
CO-I David Thirtyacre
CO-I Scott Burgess
The capability of commercial off-the-shelf 3D printers has increased rapidly over the past few years, and the ability to design, print and assemble sUAS could save academic institution resources and provide students excellent training.
Multirotor sUAS have limited endurance, range and payload carrying capabilities. Recently, the ability to print fixed-wing sUAS platforms from commercial-off-the-shelf 3D printers have lowered the barrier to entry for meeting the demands from industry with systems that are low cost and can carry electro-optical and thermal infrared sensors, multispectral and LIDAR sensors. Additionally, the advent of fixed-wing full motion video (FMV) capable drones has ushered in a new era of educational possibilities. The integration of 3D-printed fixed wing sUAS in the online classroom presents several opportunities.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Developing Autonomous, Targeted Feedback in Precalculus
PI Darryl Chamberlain
The overriding goal of this project is to investigate student knowledge in a Precalculus course at ERAU-W in order to construct autonomous, targeted feedback for free-responses questions to enhance students' online learning. This will be accomplished by analyzing student responses to exam questions and interviewing students to probe how their mathematical conceptions correspond to their exam responses.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
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A Boltzmann Simulator for Porous Media Flows
PI Leitao Chen
This project develops numerical simulations through parallel development of a Boltzmann model to capture and elucidate multiscale thermos-fluids behaviors in porous media, as well as the fluid-solid interactions.
To accurately simulate porous media flow problem, a kinetic model based on the Boltzmann equation (BE) was developed. Two primary reasons justified the choice of a BE-based approach over conventional Navier-Stokes (N-S) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods. First, the fluid flow within porous media often occurs in extremely narrow channels, representing high-Knudsen-number flow regimes. The Knudsen number (Kn), defined as the ratio of molecular mean free path to the smallest channel dimension, indicates that traditional N-S equations are physically inadequate for accurately describing these flow conditions. Conversely, BE-based models are well-established to yield physically accurate results for high-Kn flows. Second, from a computational standpoint, the BE inherently involves a simpler mathematical structure due to its linear advection term, substantially reducing computational overhead compared to the nonlinear N-S equations. This simplification significantly improves computational efficiency, especially critical for simulating flow within complex porous structures. To better capture the complex boundaries in porous media, a meshless discretization method of the BE has been developed in this project. This meshless approach entirely eliminates dependency on mesh generation, offering significant advantages in accurately simulating flow through porous media.Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Project Global Officer
PI Aaron Clevenger
Project GO provide's overseas language instruction consisting of a minimum of 8 weeks and/or 150 contact hours (per grant program) to ROTC students nationwide with the goal of helping student to reach an ILR 1 proficiency level in a critical language: Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, and Arabic in Jordan. All students should reach the objective of successfully applying the target language and cultural knowledge in actual communication with native speakers.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Pure Water Project (PWP)
PI Marc Compere
Pure Water Project aims to improve the health and sustainability of individual communities in the Dominican Republic by installing a solar-powered water purification system. Embry-Riddle students design, build, test and deliver a solar water purifier to carefully selected communities in the Dominican Republic and launch water selling businesses to benefit the local community’s health and economy.
Many in the Dominican Republic either pay for clean water or live with chronic intestinal sickness from contaminated water. Our solar water purifier is designed to provide clean drinking water for 500 adults per day. It generates 1000 gallons of clean water daily, which is enough to bottle and sell to the surrounding community.
This project is an ideal intersection of humanitarian aid and engineering. Our students design and build Embry-Riddle's solar-powered water purifier for delivery to a carefully selected community each year. Students learn how solar power systems work with batteries, pumps and filters to construct a purifier that runs entirely from the sun. This project provides our students a global perspective and makes them better engineers through their efforts to achieve goals despite the dynamic, fluid environment in a different culture.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Virtual Communities of Practice: Scaling, Belonging, and Effective Feedback
PI Cristina Cottom
CO-I Angela Atwell
CO-I Lisa Martino
CO-I Sara Ombres
The purpose of this research study is to extend CTLE-W's previous research on virtual faculty learning communities (VCoP) by testing a new VCoP for scalability with an expanded participation pool. This study also seeks to increase the sense of belonging among non-collocated faculty participants and to use the VCoP to provide continuing education on effective feedback practices.This VCoP and the research study will last for 8 weeks during the fall and spring. As part of the participation in the VCoP faculty will complete several online asynchronous activities using VoiceThread to discuss effective feedback practices, as well as a survey at the beginning and end of their VCoP experience.
This research study is an extension and expansion of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence’s existing VCoP. In 2016, our research team was awarded a grant from the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network to create a VCoP tailored specifically to online adjunct faculty, which yielded positive findings. In this current study, we were awarded additional grant funds from POD to build upon this success by designing a VCoP that recruits from our entire faculty pool in order to measure how it affects their sense of belonging and to test the framework we created for scalability. In addition, this collaborative experience will not focus on teaching in a single modality, but will instead address a shared practice that is relevant to all instructors. Regardless of modality, all instructors can improve effective feedback practices. Therefore, in this extended and expanded VCoP all faculty will have an opportunity to explore practices around effective feedback. This research will contribute to the existing literature by studying the scalability of VCoPs in faculty development settings and test how participation in VCoPs promotes belonging among dispersed faculty members teaching in multiple modalities. In addition, this study will also result in the production of documents that will facilitate future VCoP development and will generate valuable co-created knowledge on effective feedback. This study will employ a mixed-methods design that will use both quantitative and qualitative data to analyze the results of the survey. In addition, data will be collected from VoiceThread, facilitator reflections, observation notes, and artifact analysis.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion for ASV Situational Awareness
PI Eric Coyle
CO-I Patrick Currier
An investigation into strategies and techniques for maritime object detection and classification using visual and spatial data with an emphasis on sensor fusion.
This project focuses on enhancing autonomous surface vessel (ASV) situational awareness through the fusion of visual and spatial sensing, aiming to improve the detection and classification of objects in the surrounding environment. Such technologies have applications in patrolling test ranges, enhancing harbor security, and using ASVs as support vessels for manned operations. The research is structured around four main objectives: creating and annotating multi-modal maritime data for sensor fusion, developing accurate surface maps for navigation, applying machine learning techniques for robust object identification, and creating sensor fusion strategies for improved robustness. The team uses a custom data acquisition system, which was used to create the open-source ER-Coast dataset. This dataset includes Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), high-resolution cameras, infrared cameras, and localization sensors to capture coastal waterways in Florida, both day and night, across 36 sequences. A portion of this data has been made publicly available for future LiDAR semantic segmentation, image segmentation, and object detection studies.Categories: Faculty-Staff
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Exploring vulnerabilities, threats, and exploits in small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS)
PI John Craiger
Small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS), also known as drones, have been called flying computers given the overlap in their technologies. The purpose of this research is to conduct cybersecurity vulnerability assessments of several sUAS to identify vulnerabilities, threats, and associated exploits to the sUAS. Cyber vulnerabilities could theoretically allow a bad actor to take control of the sUAS, cause it to malfunction while in flight, and more.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts that purchases of hobbyist small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) will grow from 1.9 million in 2016 to 4.3 million by 2020, and commercial sUAS to increase from 600,000 in 2016 to 2.7 million by 2020. sUAS, often referred to as ‘drones,’ are comprised of aeronautical hardware, a CPU, RAM, onboard storage, radio frequency communications, sensors, a camera, and a controller used by the pilot-in-command. Some have argued that a sUAS is essentially a flying computer. As such, sUAS may be susceptible to many of the types of attacks that are often used on personal computers attached to a computer network. Potential attacks on sUAS include de-authentication (i.e., ‘terminating’ the sUAS from the network); GPS spoofing (e.g., modifying or faking GPS coordinates); unauthorized access to the computer flight systems and onboard storage; jamming the communications channel (resulting in the possible loss of the sUAS); and contaminating the sUAS geofencing mechanism (allowing the sUAS to fly in a ‘no-fly-zone’). The result of these types of attacks include theft of the sUAS; flying the sUAS into sensitive/off- limits areas; purposefully crashing the sUAS to cause damage to persons or equipment (including airplanes, crowds, etc.); and theft or adulteration of sensitive data (e.g., law enforcement surveillance data).
The purpose of this research is to identify potential threats, vulnerabilities, and exploits for a subset of consumer/hobby sUAS that were included in the 2016 ERAU sUAS Consumer Guide. The research will apply a threat modeling approach to identify cyber-based vulnerabilities; potential attack vectors; commercial-off-the-shelf and “home-built” equipment required to effectuate attacks; cyber and kinetic ramifications of attacks; and mitigating strategies for protecting sUAS from cyber-attacks. Vulnerability assessments are to be conducted via network scanning tools to identify open network ports, vulnerability scanners that identify system vulnerabilities, and tools used for the associated exploitation of these vulnerabilities. The exploitation (i.e., attack) architecture will use an attack proxy consisting of a Raspberry PI running Kali Linux OS, and specifically outfitted with multiple network interface cards, allowing the proxy to capture and manipulate network traffic in either managed or monitor (i.e., active vs. passive) mode. Given that most personal computers are known to suffer from various cyber vulnerabilities, and many of the components and software are the same as used in personal computers, we expect to observe the same for the sUAS.
Identifying threats and vulnerabilities has two purposes, one defensive, and one offensive. From the defensive side, manufacturers, and even users, should be aware of potential threats. Manufacturers should be aware that the design and component decisions can effect the cybersecurity of the sUAS. From the offensive side, sUAS pilots are known to fly them for nefarious purposes, including flying into no-fly zones, violating the privacy of individuals using attached high-definition cameras, etc. Indeed, a new and growing industry involves developing anti-drone techniques to protect against rogue sUAS and their pilots.
Categories: Faculty-Staff
41-50 of 225 results