Engineering Commons^™

The Performance Assessment Of A Small Lighter-Than-Air Vehicle For Earth Science Remote Sensing Missions, Maxwell F. Burtis

Honors College

This summer, a lighter-than-air (LTA) drone was tested in Alaska to measure glacier bedrock fracture density and orientation. Five flights were made in low wind conditions, and the directional stability of the airship made it too challenging to control in flight to realistically acquire useful image sets. The directional stability of the airship, when compared to an actively stabilized consumer-grade quadcopter was inferior. Flight logs and GPS data from the GPS on the LTA drone were analyzed and a quantitative assessment of the observed instability was made. The yaw axis and pitch were analyzed, and the yaw axis instability was …

Development Of The End-Effector Of A Cable-Driven Parallel Manipulator For Automated Crop Sensing, Iman Salafian

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A four cable-driven parallel manipulator (4CDPM), consisting of sophisticated spectrometers and imagers, is under development for use in acquiring phenotypic and environmental data over an acre-sized maize field. This thesis presents the design, controls, and testing of two sub-systems in a 4CDPM: a Center of Mass Balance System (CMBS) and a Drop-Down System (DDS).

One of the factors that influences stability is the center of mass (COM) position of the end effector. An offset in COM can cause a pendulum effect or an undesired tilt angle. A center of mass balancing system is presented in this thesis to minimize the …

Development Of Geospatial And Temporal Characteristics For Hispaniola’S Lake Azuei And Enriquillo Using Landsat Imagery, Mahrokh Moknatian, Michael Piasecki, Jorge Gonzalez

Publications and Research

In this paper, we used Landsat imagery for water body identification to create a novel 36-year surface area extent time series for lakes Azuei (Haiti) and Enriquillo (Dominican Republic) aimed at illuminating the dramatic temporal changes of these two lakes not just at yearly but at monthly or even sub-monthly scales. We used the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) to extract water features and we also used spatial differentiation and thresholding techniques to remove clouds and associated shadows from the scene that were then passed through gap filling algorithms to complete and extract the lake extent polygons. We also explored …

Autonomous Indoor Localization Via Field Mapping Techniques, With Agricultural Big Data Application, Yan Cui, Kartik Ariyur, Benjamin D. Branch

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

This joint collaboration between the library, the Mechanical Engineering department shows the current research of localizing an Android smartphone using big data collection and sensor fusion techniques. The original work is Autonomous Indoor Localization via Field Mapping Techniques which primarily designed as indoor fire and safety aid.

For Agricultural Big Data Use, the Android smartphone is being applied to in indoor greenhouse fire, safety and data knowledge design. Such may aid big data tool value to greenhouse fire and safety design and any data that may be important fieldwork considerations.

The indoor agricultural mapping application may be application to greenhouses …

Modeling Acoustic Scattering From The Seabed Using Transport Theory, Jorge Quijano, Lisa M. Zurk

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Radiative Transfer (RT) theory has established itself as an important tool for electromagnetic remote sensing in parallel plane geometries with random distributions of scatterers, and most recently it has also been proposed as a model for the propagation of elastic waves in layered ocean sediments. In this work the capabilities of this model are illustrated, as the RT method is used to predict backscattering strength from laboratory models of random media. The RT model is characterized by its flexibility on accommodating scatterers in a broad variety of sizes, shapes, and acoustic contrast relative to the background media. Additionally, this formulation …