Engineering Commons^™

Rapid Indirect Trajectory Optimization On Highly Parallel Computing Architectures, Thomas Antony

Open Access Theses

Trajectory optimization is a field which can benefit greatly from the advantages offered by parallel computing. The current state-of-the-art in trajectory optimization focuses on the use of direct optimization methods, such as the pseudo-spectral method. These methods are favored due to their ease of implementation and large convergence regions while indirect methods have largely been ignored in the literature in the past decade except for specific applications in astrodynamics. It has been shown that the shortcomings conventionally associated with indirect methods can be overcome by the use of a continuation method in which complex trajectory solutions are obtained by solving …

Impact Of License Selection On Open Source Software Quality, Benjamin J. Cotton

Open Access Theses

Open source software plays an important part in the modern world, powering businesses large and small. However, little work has been done to evaluate the quality of open source software. Two different license paradigms exist within the open source world, and this study examines the difference in software quality between them. In this thesis, the author uses technical debt as a measure of software quality. Eighty open source projects (40 from each paradigm) were downloaded from the popular open source hosting website SourceForge. Using complexity, code duplication, comments, and unit test coverage as inputs to the SonarQube technical debt model, …

Wi-Fi Real Time Location Systems, Benjamin A. Doll

Open Access Theses

This thesis objective was to determine the viability of utilizing an untrained Wi-Fi real time location system as a GPS alternative for indoor environments. Background research showed that GPS is rarely able to penetrate buildings to provide reliable location data. The benefit of having location information in a facility and how they might be used for disaster or emergency relief personnel and their resources motivated this research. A building was selected with a well-deployed Wi-Fi infrastructure and its untrained location feature was used to determine the distance between the specified test points and the system identified location. It was found …

Digital Image Correlation Of Heterogeneous Deformations In Polycrystalline Material With Electron Backscatter Diffraction, Javier Esquivel

Open Access Theses

This work establishes the ability to conduct digital image correlation (DIC) investigations at varying length scales. DIC allows for a computational method of strain field measurements using multiple images to track random speckle patterns on material surfaces. The use of a powder silicon oxide speckle allows for high optical magnification correlation using conventional load frames. Self-assembling gold nanoparticles provide sub-micron resolution speckle patterns to study microstructure influences on deformation using scanning electron microscopy. The complex microstructure in aerospace grade aluminum and nickel-based superalloys, give rise to varied deformation fields, which can be studied using electron backscatter diffraction. Specimen preparation techniques, …

Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer System For The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Tae Sup Lee

Open Access Theses

UAVs have limitless applications to help our daily lives for the autonomous operations. UAVs have a limited power capacity due to weight constraints and are therefore not able to travel long distances. Ground stations for recharging UAVs throughout different points can increase the flight time of the UAVs with the current UAV battery capacity. This study investigates how the wireless charging system for the ground station can be made more robust when there are misalignments. The wireless charging system is monitored by an Arduino, micro controller, to assess the current condition of charging. The Arduino is able to change the …

Evaluating Optimum Levels Of Detail For 3d Interactive Aviation Maintenance Instructions, Nicholas Rohe

Open Access Theses

With the aviation industry shifting from paper based maintenance instructions to digital maintenance instructions, there needs to be a standard for what goes into creating the digital instructions. This study was done to determine what the optimum level of detail for 3D interactive aviation maintenance instructions. The definition of optimum for this study was: lowest amount of geometrical data with lowest rendering needed for comprehension and ease of use.

Indoor Acoustic Mapping And Geolocation, Thomas Shyy

Open Access Theses

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is widely used in navigations of flights, vehicles and travelers nowadays. However, the signals are not always available and there are some cases where the receptions of the GPS signal can be lost because of the presence of urban canyons, buildings, tunnels and forests. Another down side for the GPS is that indoor positioning can be really difficult because of the greater signal interference from the indoor.

On the other hand, the concept of echolocation has also been used for positioning purposes. Echolocation offers a promising approach to improve the quality of life of people …

Software Architecture And Development For Controlling A Hubo Humanoid Robot, Manas Ajit Paldhe

Open Access Theses

Due to their human-like structure, humanoid robots are capable of doing some complex tasks. Since a humanoid robot has a large number of actuators and sensors, controlling it is a difficult task. For various tasks like balancing, driving a car, and interacting with humans, real-time response of the robot is essential. Efficiently controlling a humanoid robot requires a software that guarantees real-time interface and control mechanism so that real-time response of the robot is possible. Addition- ally, to reduce the development effort and time, the software should be open-source, multi-lingual and should have high-level constructs inbuilt in it.

Currently Robot …

Analysis Of Eye Tracking Data Obtained By Customers’ Product Evaluations, Shweta Sanjay Sareen

Open Access Theses

Within the mechanical engineering discipline, product representational studies have been used to inform engineers on the suitability of their product designs for prospective customers. Mainly based in customers' oral responses, engineers would modify the product design accordingly. The incorporation of eye tracking data, in addition to the oral responses, in these product representational studies is a recent addition. This case study performs data analysis of a product representational study conducted by Reid, MacDonald and Du (2012), which considers the impact of 2D and 3D product representation on customer judgments with associated eye gaze patterns. The aim of this thesis is …

Reliability Guided Resource Allocation For Large-Scale Supercomputing Systems, Shruti Umamaheshwaran

Open Access Theses

In high performance computing systems, parallel applications request a large number of resources for long time periods. In this scenario, if a resource fails during the application runtime, it would cause all applications using this resource to fail. The probability of application failure is tied to the inherent reliability of resources used by the application. Our investigation of high performance computing systems operating in the field has revealed a significant difference in the measured operational reliability of individual computing nodes. By adding awareness of the individual system nodes' reliability to the scheduler along with the predicted reliability needs of parallel …

A Farm Management Information System With Task-Specific, Collaborative Mobile Apps And Cloud Storage Services, Jonathan Tyler Welte

Open Access Theses

Modern production agriculture is beginning to advance beyond deterministic, scheduled operations between relatively few people to larger scale, information-driven efficiency in order to respond to the challenges of field variability and meet the needs of a growing population. Since no two farms are the same with respect to information and management structure, a specialized farm management information system (FMIS) which is tailored to the realities on the ground of individual farms is likely to be more effective than generalized FMIS available today.

This thesis presents the design of a FMIS using proven user-centered design principles. This approach resulted in the …