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NEWSLETTER Quarter 4, 2018

Testing Evaluation and Control of Heterogeneous Large-scale Systems of Autonomous Vehicles

(TECHLAV)

contents Open letter from the Director ................................................................................................. 3

Message from the Dean .................... ....................................................................................... 4

About TECHLAV ................................ ....................................................................................... 5

Research Thrust highlights ...................................................................................................... 6

Message from the SIAB Chair ................................................................................................... 9

Education and Outreach & Publication Highlights .................................................................. 10

TECHLAV Team ....................................................................................................................... 12

SIAB Members ....................................................................................................................... 14

Student spotlight .................................................................................................................. 15

Upcoming Events .................................................................................................................. 16

Acknowledgement ................................................................................................................ 17

TECHLAV Newsletter is a quarterly publication of the Autonomous Control and Information

Technology institute, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University.

Open letter from the Director

TECHLAV Center News Page 3

The Testing, Evaluation and Control of

Heterogeneous Large-scale Systems of

Autonomous Vehicles (TECHLAV) Center’s

vision is to serve as a recognized national

leader in control and autonomy and to develop

tools, techniques, and algorithms for the

modeling, analysis, control, coordination

testing, and evaluation of large-scale systems

of autonomous vehicles.

The goal of this newsletter is to highlight and

celebrate the many achievements of this team

and as such, each quarter we will spotlight a

TECHLAV faculty and student.

TECHLAV continues to move closer to

producing substantial work that will increase national and regional economic growth fostered by the

development, adoption, and effective use of new technologies. This year has been a reminder that we

have been able to make tremendous strides thanks to the commitment to partnership, dedication and hard

work of our faculty, staff members, and most importantly students at North Carolina A&T State

University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute.

The support of our sponsors, scientific and industrial advisory board members, administrators and

supporting teams at all three institutions have also ensured our success. Through the efforts of many that

we have made progress toward longstanding advances that we all desire. Thank you for your

commitment to TECHLAV’s vision and success!

Abdollah Homaifar, Ph.D.

NASA Langley Distinguished Chair Professor,

Duke Energy Eminent Professor and

Director, Autonomous Control and Information

Technology (ACIT) Institute,

Director, TECHLAV Center

Email: [email protected]

Telephone: 336-285-3271

message from the Dean If you have not had a chance to visit the heterogeneous autonomous vehicle testing facility, which is one of the core labs of the TECHLAV team, I encourage you to do so. This high-bay area laboratory enables both aerial and ground-based autonomous vehicles to be simultaneously and safely operated; and it continues to evolve to effectively house the work the TECHLAV team is advancing. I applaud the achievements and agility of the TECHLAV team, and I sincerely thank the center’s sponsors, and the center’s scientific and industrial advisory board for your continued support and dedication. Because of all of you, TECHLAV’s impact in creating groundbreaking technical advancements and in providing a well-prepared workforce in the area of autonomous systems, will continue to expand. TECHLAV and the center’s achievements are possible because of the engagement and collaborations of its team members and supporters. I congratulate all who are contributing to its success. For those excited by the future opportunities for this exciting center, I encourage you to engage with the center and keep abreast of its’ many groundbreaking activities. Congratulations to the TECHLAV Team! Sincerely, Robin N. Coger, Ph.D Dean, College of Engineering North Carolina A&T State University

Congratulations to the faculty, staff, and students of the Testing, Evaluation and Control of Heterogeneous Large-scale Systems of Autonomous Vehicles (TECHLAV) Center, led by Dr. Abdollah Homaifar, for all the center is accomplishing in the important area of autonomous systems. TECHLAV relies on a multidisciplinary team of experts from multiple institutions. The center’s inclusion of diverse thinkers in creating solutions in control and autonomy has made it an excellent demonstration of the strength and possibilities of collaboration. TECHLAV is also directly aligned with our College of Engineering’s focus on cultivating leaders who excel in academics, innovation, and research. The center has prioritized the production of quality scholarly output. In 2018 alone, its researchers published over 23 relevant conference and journal papers and filed two patents. Additionally, because TECHLAV is a strong supporter of students, its research and educational activities continue to create a fertile ground for developing a well-prepared future autonomous system workforce. Currently, the center supports 24 doctoral students, 8 master’s degree students, and 15 undergraduate students. I am confident that these engineers and computer scientists will contribute to our society in ways we can only imagine.


about TECHLAV

Our Mission The TECHLAV Center is (1) addressing fundamental problems in m o d e l i n g , a n a l y s i s , c o n t r o l , coordination, test and evaluation of autonomous systems (2) serves as a national resource in education and research in Autonomy, (3) provides outreach services in autonomy related areas, and (4) fosters linkages among national institutions of higher education, government agencies and private companies (5) commercializes TECHLAV technologies for the benefit of the national economy.

Our Vision The TECHLAV Center will serve as a recognized national leader in control and autonomy to develop tools, techniques, and algorithms for m o d e l l i n g , a n a l ys i s , co n t ro l , coordination, testing, evaluation of large scale systems of autonomous vehicles, and to provide advanced education in autonomy related areas.

The TECHALV Center is a Center of Excellence in Autonomy, funded by the Department of Defense. The Center, led by N.C. A&T is comprised of a strong multi-disciplinary team and synergizes expertise in Control, Communication, and Human Cognition from N.C. A&T and its collaborator, the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA). The Center also partners with the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI) to provide and promote education, outreach activities, and curriculum development to a larger Native American community.

The research activities are addressing two fundamental grand challenges: 1) Teaming and Cooperative Control of Large-scale Autonomous Systems of Vehicles (LSASVs) integrated with human operators, and 2) Testing, Evaluation, Validation, and Verification of LSASVs.

These challenges are met through three interleaved research thrusts: • Thrust 1: Modeling, Analysis and Control of LSASVs • Thrust 2: Resilient Control & Communication of LSASVs

• Thrust 3: Testing, Evaluations and Verification of Large-scale Autonomous Vehicles (TEVLAV)


Photo credit: www.eduardosuastegui.com

Demonstration, Implementation and Integration (DII) - Test and validates the Performance of the developed tools and protocols in real world scenarios .

Designed a hybrid controller for the real-

time control and path planning of an

attacking autonomous vehicle to win a

dynamic reach-avoid game against a

defending vehicle.

Hardware experiments testing two

configurations of the cloud-edge

infrastructure have been performed.

These experiments were used to verify

that the cloud and edge device

configurations are working correctly for

proper data collection.

Statistics gathering using hardware

configurations will be performed in the

next quarter on the cruise ship disaster

scenario response simulator. Software

modifications have to been performed to

convert the complex cruise ship disaster

scenario simulator to be compatible with

the cloud and edge device architecture.

thrust 1 Highlights


Thrust 1 led by Dr. Mo Jamshidi at UTSA, develops scalable methodologies to improve modeling, analysis, localization, navigation, and control of Large-scale Autonomous Systems of Vehicles (LSASVs). The highlights of this quarter are listed as follows:

Developed a quadcopter with capabilities of safe indoor autonomous flight, and automated landing and charging procedures. This quadcopter acts as a complex model for which a basis for making much needed localization improvements to the terrestrial testbed of robotic platforms is provided.

Identified an off-road outdoor capable chassis to

replace the small indoor-only chassis for the

UGV platform. This platform is used for

multiple vehicle research and can be obtained

for less than $200. This new Ackerman style

chassis is a capable, scale-sized rock crawler

platform.


thrust 2 Highlights Thrust 2, led by Dr. Ali Karimoddini at NCAT, develops systematic techniques, tools, and algorithms to enhance the reliability and efficacy of the control structure and the communication backbone for Large-scale Autonomous Systems of Vehicles (LSASVs) integrated with human operators in dynamic and uncertain environments such as the battlefield. The highlights of this quarter are listed as follows: Developed an algorithmic approach for

constructing a semi-asynchronous diagnoser

that detects faults in a system despite

uncertainties in information about the initial

conditions of the system, without requiring the

system under diagnosis to be restarted to re-

synchronize the diagnoser and the system

under diagnosis.

Developed a new approach for collecting and

formatting data so that the fault diagnostic

model can accurately make predictions. Once

data is collected, the fault diagnostic model is

developed, trained, and tested using RNN with

LSTM units.

Given a number of ground IoT users dis-

tributed in a 2-D area, an optimization

problem was formulated to simultaneous-

ly optimize the location and number of

the UAVs in order to provide wireless

coverage for the users.

Investigated the impact of inaccurate

beam alignment on the performance of a

directional mmWave D2D network of

communicating agents and used tools

from stochastic geometry to quantify the

signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio

(SINR) coverage probability in the pres-

ence of beam misalignment, which can be

applied to evaluate D2D network perfor-

mance.

Reconstructed Advantageous Asynchro-

nous Actor-Critic Algorithm (A3C) in

MATLAB that has thus far showed posi-

tive results. Most of the diagnostic data to

Tensorboard has been ported, which is an

ideal way to visualize Neural Network

performance.


thrust 3 Highlights Thrust 3 led by Dr. Younho Seong at NCAT,

provides technologies and tools for testing,

evaluation, validation, and verification of

heterogeneous Large-scale Autonomous Systems

of Vehicles (LSASV). The highlights of this quarter

are listed as follows:

Developed a high level Architectural Analysis

and Design Language (AADL) model of a

heterogeneous multi-agent system.

Employed the Reinforcement Learning (RL)

approach for capturing the human-robot

cooperation. For this purpose, we used an MDP

model of the agent to describe the system

(agent and the human operator). We then used

this model to design a controller for the agent

to achieve its goal in collaboration with a

human operator. Since the agent does not have

any prior knowledge about the system, Q-

learning algorithm was employed to solve the

RL-based human-robot collaboration problem.

Created a simple testbed in which the impact of

automation failure may cause disruption in

human operators' reliance on automation

which consequently reflected on human brain

signals captured.

Conducted two experiments in human

cognition, decision making and neural

responses to different information visualization

to investigate how the information display

could impact human decision making process

and performance under uncertain environment

and the results were summarized.

Developed a dynamic feature selection pro-

cedure to enhance the computational effi-

ciency in the sensor data stream analysis of

LSASVs.

Developed a data driven model for target

classification using the theory of belief

functions. The uncertain information with

respect to various attributes of the un-

known target is encoded by belief functions

which are fused to obtain the final belief

function. Decision regarding the class of

the target is taken based on the pignistic

probability distribution of the final mass

function. For proper management of possi-

ble conflicts that may emanate as a result of

combination of belief functions induced

from different sensor data. We introduced

a combination scheme that accounts for not

only the information contained in the indi-

vidual belief functions but also the reliabil-

ity of the source producing them.


message from the SIAB Chair

Dr. Edward Tunstel is an Associate Director of

Robotics in the Autonomous and Intelligent Systems

Department of UTRC focused on human-

collaborative robotics and autonomy for aerospace

and building industries. He joined UTRC in 2017

after 10 years at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics

Laboratory as a senior roboticist and as space

robotics and autonomous control lead engaged in

research for national security and space applications.

Prior to APL he was with NASA JPL for 18 years, as

a senior robotics engineer, group leader of its

Advanced Robotic Controls Group, and flight

systems engineer responsible for autonomous

navigation and associated V&V for NASA Mars

rovers. He earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in

mechanical engineering from Howard University

and the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the

University of New Mexico. He is an IEEE Fellow,

President of the IEEE SMC Society, and NSBE

Professionals member.

Edward Tunstel, Ph.D., FIEEE

Chair, Scientific and Industry Advisory Board

As Chair of the Scientific and Industry Advisory

Board, I have enjoyed the vantage point, shared

with fellow Board members, from which we can

objectively assess its technical direction and offer

advice toward its increased effectiveness and broad

impact. This is particularly exciting at this time in

technology history when we are collectively

witnessing the evolution, and creating the future of

computer-based autonomous systems. We are doing

a great service focusing on problems of interest to

the Department of Defense and shared by other

sectors of industry. The graduates of TECHLAV

will be highly sought after as a result of their

education and training in cutting edge autonomous

systems synthesis and evaluation for real-world

applications.

From the SIAB perspective, TECHLAV is doing

very well at earning its designation as an Autonomy

Center of Excellence and is performing on par with

other major universities engaged in autonomy

research. This should not be conflated with the

longstanding field of test & evaluation for the range

of engineering systems that preceded systems now

embedded with computational autonomy. The latter

present new and formidable challenges for which

advanced solutions are being fueled by algorithms

and methodologies of autonomous control, machine

learning, cognitive computing, and knowledge-

based or automated reasoning facilities of AI.

Within this new context, TECHLAV students and

faculty are advancing the state of the emerging art

as applicable to large-scale systems of autonomous

vehicles. It is great to see North Carolina A&T State

University, the University of Texas at San Antonio,

and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute

collectively stepping into and owning this role.

highlight Education and Outreach TECHLAV promotes a diverse, productive, and prepared workforce with more STEM graduates: N.C. A&T’s education and outreach is led by Dr. John C. Kelly, and SIPI’s is led by Dr. Nader Vadiee. The Center will strengthen planned academic programs at N.C. A&T, and will increase multidisciplinary and cross-listed courses across these three campuses. Organized bi-weekly seminar series for faculty and students at N.C. A&T, UTSA and SIPI to present,

share ideas and update one another on the progress of the respective tasks. The details can be found

on the TECHLAV Website at the following URL addresses: http://techlav.ncat.edu/seminars.html".

During this period, research assistantship was provided to 18 PhD and 8 Master students, as well as 8

undergraduate students at N.C. A&TSU, UTSA, and SIPI. These students, in collaboration with their

respective faculty advisors are involved in various research tasks and testbed preparations.

Offered 19 autonomy related courses between the three campuses.

The primary outreach focus of this quarter was on 4th-8th grade students across the state of North

Carolina. A total of 15 FIRST LEGO League activities/events were organized, comprising of approxi-

mately 500 excited teams. The students programmed LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robots to autonomously

solve missions using robot attachments built out of LEGOs. The students took advantage of touch,

infrared, gyro, color, and ultrasonic sensors to control their robots. Each team was judged on project

presentations, which were focused on identifying the challenges humans must overcome to travel in

our solar system for long periods and proposing an innovative solution.


highlight Education and Outreach A group of ACIT undergraduate students and PhD mentors, worked on establishing wireless com-

munication between Ground IoT Devices and UAVs. The objective of the project was to develop a

way to minimize the total transmit energy from UAVs to UGVs in wireless communication.

Another group of UG students and PhD mentors at the ACIT lab were involved in a 3D Navigation

by UAV project. Multiple programs were installed onto the Intel Aero compute board, which was

the basis for this project. Such programs included a Robotic Operating System (ROS), and OpenCV.

A PCL library was also installed that will be used for obstacle avoidance in the future.

Undergraduate students at the ACCESS laboratory worked towards the testbed development and

implementation of an autonomous car under the Autodrive Challenge organized by SAE Interna-

tional and GM. The car was redesigned more efficiently by using a more appropriate switch and

moving the system away from rely-

ing on a heavy-duty power inverter.

To support the large data transfer

rates, a low powered, more rugged

routing switch capable of higher

bandwidths was used.

The SIPI Pre-Engineering team and

Dr. Nader Vadiee, visited the UNM

Mechanical Engineering Fluid Dy-

namics Lab and met with UNM pro-

fessors Peter Voribie and Randy Tru-

man.


publications Published and submitted 21 journal and conference papers (one published conference paper, one accepted journal paper, seven accepted conference papers, six submitted journal papers, and six submitted conference papers) in relevant journal and conference papers as research outcomes of TECHLAV. The list of publications is available at http://techlav.ncat.edu/publications.html"

TECHLAV Team Dr. Abdollah (Ebbie) Homaifar NASA Langley Distinguished Chair Professor, Duke Energy Eminent Professor at

N.C. A&T State University, Director of the Autonomous Control and Information

Technology (ACIT) Institute, and Testing, Evaluation, and Control of Heterogene-

ous Large-scale Systems of Autonomous Vehicles (TECHLAV) Center.

Dr. Mo Jamshidi leads Thrust 1. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ASME, AAAS, NYAS,

TWA. He is also the Lutcher Brown Endowed Professor at the UTSA. He has been

an advisor to NASA, US Air Force, USDOE and EC/EU.

Dr. Ali Karimoddini is the Deputy Director of TECHLAV, Leads research Thrust

2, and is the Director of the Autonomous Cooperative Control of Emergent Sys-

tem of Systems (ACCESS) laboratory at N.C. A&T. He has received over 12 mil-

lion in research support from federal funding agencies and industrial partners.

Dr. Younho Seong leads research Thrust 3. He is an Associate Professor in Indus-

trial & Systems Engineering at N.C. A&T and has performed research on judg-

ment, decision making, and trust in automation for more than 15 years. His goal is

to improve judgment and decision making performance by transforming the deci-

sion aid to be “more transparent.”

Dr. John C. Kelly leads the education and outreach component of the center. He

has served as the chairperson of the ECE Department at N.C. A&T since 2000. Pri-

or to that, he served as the Associate Dean for Graduate and Research Programs

in the College of Engineering.

Dr. Sun Yi obtained his B.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from

Seoul National University in 2004, and his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2006

and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2009 from the University of Michigan,

Ann Arbor.


TECHLAV Team


Mrs. Shar Seyedin is TECHLAV’s Program Manager within N.C. A&T’s ACIT

Institute. Her expertise is in program and project management with a focus on

strategic multi-disciplinary team management and multi-agency project organiza-

tion, implementation, and execution. She is a business professional with over 12

years of experience in both financial & academic research sectors.

Dr. Joseph Stephens earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie

Mellon University in 2006. His research focus at N.C. A&T is on how humans in-

tegrate multiple sources of information He also conducts research projects in hu-

man memory and decision making.

Dr. Nader Vadiee leads the outreach activities at SIPI. He has more than 30 years

of experience in both academia and industry, and has conducted research and of-

fered courses in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was selected by the

Carnegie Foundation as the 2009 New Mexico Professor of the Year, and he serves

on the New Mexico State Math and Science Council.

Dr. Brian Kelley is an Associate Professor of ECE at the UTSA. He is a leading

researcher on communication systems, 5G cellular, and cloud radio access com-

munications. He is the Associate Professor of ECE and Director of the Wireless

Next Generation Systems (WiNGS) Lab at UTSA.

Dr. Patrick Benavidez received his B.S. degree, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electri-

cal Engineering from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is currently a

post-doctoral fellow and an adjunct professor at UTSA.

Dr. Paul Rad received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Sharif University of Tech-

nology in Computer Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in computer engineering

from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Currently, he is the Chief Research

Officer and Assistant Director of Open Cloud Institute (OCI) at UTSA.

SIAB Members


Edward Tunstel, Jr. Associate Director, Robotics United Technologies Research Center

Garry Roedler Lockheed Martin Fellow Engineering Outreach Program Manager Lockheed Martin Corporation

Roberto Horowitz James Fife Endowed Chair, Director, Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology (PATH), Professor of Mechani-cal Engineering University of California, Berkeley

Paul C. Hershey Raytheon Intelligence Infor-

mation and Services Senior En-

gineering Fellow

Daniel DeLaurentis Professor Department of Aerospace Engi-neering Purdue University

Alexander Eksir Vice-President

Supplier Quality

UTC Aerospace Systems

Russell L. (Rusty) Roberts Director Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Lab Georgia Tech Research Institute

Sandra Begay Technical Assistance Program Sandia National Laboratories’

tribal energy

Alton S. Wallace Senior Independent

Research Consultant

Julius Yellowhair Senior Member of the Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories

Mark Noakes Senior R&D Staff, Robotics and Remote Systems Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Bijan Sayyarrodsari Manager - Research & Develop-ment Center, Strategic Development, Rockwell Automation

student Spotlight

Wendell Bates What sets you apart as a student?

I believe that my experience working

in the industry prior to returning to

pursue my Ph.D. has helped me gain

perspective and appreciate the value of

education and the level of support that

I have received at the TECHLAV

Center. Working for BMW for four

and a half years in a management role

taught me invaluable skills dealing

with people and work/life balance. It is

very easy to get overwhelmed with the

workload and mental demands of a

job. Now I remind myself that the

journey should also be fun. I try to

bring that same mindset and energy

to the lab and make my colleagues

laugh or smile. I believe that we are

more productive when we’re happy.

The more productive we are as

individuals, the better we are as a

research group.

~ Wendell Bates ~

Wendell Bates received his Bachelor and Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2008 and 2011, respectively. He then joined BMW Manufacturing, Inc. as a Quality Engineer and Electrical Systems Integration Engineer. In 2016, he joined North Carolina A&T State University to pursue his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering. His research interests include Safe, Robust, and Reliable Control Systems, Hybrid Control Systems, Discrete Event Systems, and Robotics. He is also a member of the Autonomous Cooperative Control of Emergent Systems of Systems (ACCESS) Lab as well as the Testing, Evaluation and Control of Heterogeneous Large-scale systems of Autonomous Vehicles (TECHLAV) Center.


upcoming Events TECHLAV’s Fourth Annual Meeting is currently underway to be held from

June 25 until June 26, 2019 at UTSA. This meeting stands to capitalize on the major successes of the Third Annual Meeting and further TECHLAV’s efforts in autonomy, STEM involvement amongst mi-nority students and partnerships, groundbreaking research, and collaboration. The upcoming meeting is committed to excellence by presenting keynote speakers such as, Dr. Corey Schumacher, who serves as the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Chief Engineer for Autonomy in Motion and the Chief Technolo-gy Officer for the Autonomy Research Collaboration Network.


Seminar series guest speakers: Jan. 18, 2019 Ali Raz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Purdue University Feb. 1, 2019 Jeremy J. Dawkins, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, United States Naval Academy Feb. 15, 2019 Adrian Stoica, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, JPL Feb. 22, 2019 Tadilo Bogale, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, N.C. A&T Mar. 1, 2019 Madjid Fathi, Ph.D., Professor, University of Siegen, Germany Mar. 22, 2019 Amir Ajorlou, Ph.D. Research Scientist, MIT Mar. 29, 2019 Juan Morinelly, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Rockwell Automation April 5, 2019 Jim Gregory, Ph.D., Professor, Ohio State University April 12, 2019 Bijan Sayyarrodsari, Director of Advanced Analytics at Rockwell Automation April 26, 2019 Shaoshuai Mao, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Purdue University May 3, 2019 Luca Carlone, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, MIT May 17, 2019 Dimitar Filev, Ph.D., Executive Technical leader at Ford Motor Company

http://techlav.ncat.edu/3rd-annual-meeting.html


sponsor Acknowledgement

The TECHLAV Center would like to acknowledge the Department of

Defense (DoD), the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), and Air

Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

The views and conclusions being discussed here are those of the

researchers and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing

the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of

Air Force Research Laboratory, OSD, or the U.S. Government.

Testing , Evaluation and Control of Heterogeneous Large-scale

Systems of Autonomous Vehicles (TECHLAV) Center

Fort IRC, Suite 221

1601 E. Market Street

Greensboro, NC 27411

Ph.: (336) 285-3271

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