Computer Engineering Commons^™

Improving The Flexibility And Robustness Of Machine Tending Mobile Robots, Richard Ethan Hollingsworth

Theses and Dissertations

While traditional manufacturing production cells consist of a fixed base robot repetitively performing tasks, the Industry 5.0 flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) aims to bring Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulators (AIMMs) to the factory floor. Composed of a wheeled base and a robot arm, these collaborative robots (cobots) operate alongside people while autonomously performing tasks at different workstations. AIMMs have been tested in real production systems, but the development of the control algorithms necessary for automating a robot that is a combination of two cobots remains an open challenge before the large scale adoption of this technology occurs in industry. Currently popular …

Wifi Sensing At The Edge Towards Scalable On-Device Wireless Sensing Systems, Steven M. Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

WiFi sensing offers a powerful method for tracking physical activities using the radio-frequency signals already found throughout our homes and offices. This novel sensing modality offers continuous and non-intrusive activity tracking since sensing can be performed (i) without requiring wearable sensors, (ii) outside the line-of-sight, and even (iii) through the wall. Furthermore, WiFi has become a ubiquitous technology in our computers, our smartphones, and even in low-cost Internet of Things devices. In this work, we consider how the ubiquity of these low-cost WiFi devices offer an unparalleled opportunity for improving the scalability of wireless sensing systems. Thus far, WiFi sensing …

Virtual Plc Platform For Security And Forensics Of Industrial Control Systems, Syed Ali Qasim

Theses and Dissertations

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are vital in managing critical infrastructures, including nuclear power plants and electric grids. With the advent of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), these systems have been integrated into broader networks, enhancing efficiency but also becoming targets for cyberattacks. Central to ICS are Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), which bridge the physical and cyber worlds and are often exploited by attackers. There's a critical need for tools to analyze cyberattacks on PLCs, uncover vulnerabilities, and improve ICS security. Existing tools are hindered by the proprietary nature of PLC software, limiting scalability and efficiency.

To overcome these challenges, …

Portable Robotic Navigation Aid For The Visually Impaired, Lingqiu Jin

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims to address the limitations of existing visual-inertial (VI) SLAM methods - lack of needed robustness and accuracy - for assistive navigation in a large indoor space. Several improvements are made to existing SLAM technology, and the improved methods are used to enable two robotic assistive devices, a robot cane, and a robotic object manipulation aid, for the visually impaired for assistive wayfinding and object detection/grasping. First, depth measurements are incorporated into the optimization process for device pose estimation to improve the success rate of VI SLAM's initialization and reduce scale drift. The improved method, called depth-enhanced visual-inertial …

Machine Learning Models To Automate Radiotherapy Structure Name Standardization, Priyankar Bose

Theses and Dissertations

Structure name standardization is a critical problem in Radiotherapy planning systems to correctly identify the various Organs-at-Risk, Planning Target Volumes and `Other' organs for monitoring present and future medications. Physicians often label anatomical structure sets in Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) images with nonstandard random names. Hence, the standardization of these names for the Organs at Risk (OARs), Planning Target Volumes (PTVs), and `Other' organs is a vital problem. Prior works considered traditional machine learning approaches on structure sets with moderate success. We compare both traditional methods and deep neural network-based approaches on the multimodal vision-language prostate cancer …

Learning Robot Motion From Creative Human Demonstration, Charles C. Dietzel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a learning from demonstration framework that enables a robot to learn and perform creative motions from human demonstrations in real-time. In order to satisfy all of the functional requirements for the framework, the developed technique is comprised of two modular components, which integrate together to provide the desired functionality. The first component, called Dancing from Demonstration (DfD), is a kinesthetic learning from demonstration technique. This technique is capable of playing back newly learned motions in real-time, as well as combining multiple learned motions together in a configurable way, either to reduce trajectory error or to generate entirely …

Continual Learning From Stationary And Non-Stationary Data, Lukasz Korycki

Theses and Dissertations

Continual learning aims at developing models that are capable of working on constantly evolving problems over a long-time horizon. In such environments, we can distinguish three essential aspects of training and maintaining machine learning models - incorporating new knowledge, retaining it and reacting to changes. Each of them poses its own challenges, constituting a compound problem with multiple goals.

Remembering previously incorporated concepts is the main property of a model that is required when dealing with stationary distributions. In non-stationary environments, models should be capable of selectively forgetting outdated decision boundaries and adapting to new concepts. Finally, a significant difficulty …

Machine Learning (Ml) - Assisted Tools For Enhancing Security And Privacy Of Edge Devices, Santosh Kumar Nukavarapu

Theses and Dissertations

The rapid growth of edge-based IoT devices, their use cases, and autonomous communication has created new challenges with privacy and security. Side-channel attacks are one of the examples of security and privacy vulnerabilities that can cause inference at Internet-Service Provider (ISP) and local Wi-Fi networks. Such an attack would leak user’s sensitive information such as home occupancy, medical activity, and daily routines. Another example is that these devices have weak authentication and low encryption standards, making them an easy target for malware-based attacks such as denial of service or launching other network attacks using these infected devices. This thesis dissertation …

Changeset-Based Retrieval Of Source Code Artifacts For Bug Localization, Agnieszka Ciborowska

Theses and Dissertations

Modern software development is extremely collaborative and agile, with unprecedented speed and scale of activity. Popular trends like continuous delivery and continuous deployment aim at building, fixing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. Bug localization, which aims to automatically localize bug reports to relevant software artifacts, has the potential to improve software developer efficiency by reducing the time spent on debugging and examining code. To date, this problem has been primarily addressed by applying information retrieval techniques based on static code elements, which are intrinsically unable to reflect how software evolves over time. Furthermore, as prior approaches frequently …

Improving Feature Learning Capability And Interpretability Of Unsupervised Neural Networks, Chathurika S. Wickramasinghe Brahmana

Theses and Dissertations

The motivation for this dissertation is two-prong. Firstly, the current state of machine learning imposes the need for unsupervised Machine Learning (ML). Secondly, once such models are developed, a deeper understanding of ML models is necessary for humans to adapt and use such models.

Real-world systems generate massive amounts of unlabeled data at rapid speed, limiting the usability of state-of-the-art supervised machine learning approaches. Further, the manual labeling process is expensive, time-consuming, and requires the expertise of the data. Therefore, the existing supervised learning algorithms are unable to take advantage of the abundance of real-world unlabeled data. Thus, relying on …

Deep Learning Assisted Intelligent Visual And Vehicle Tracking Systems, Liang Xu

Theses and Dissertations

Sensor fusion and tracking is the ability to bring together measurements from multiple sensors of the current and past time to estimate the current state of a system. The resulting state estimate is more accurate compared with the direct sensor measurement because it balances between the state prediction based on the assumed motion model and the noisy sensor measurement. Systems can then use the information provided by the sensor fusion and tracking process to support more-intelligent actions and achieve autonomy in a system like an autonomous vehicle. In the past, widely used sensor data are structured, which can be directly …

A General Framework For Characterizing And Evaluating Attacker Models For Cps Security Assessment, Christopher S. Deloglos, Christopher Deloglos

Theses and Dissertations

Characterizing the attacker’s perspective is essential to assessing the security posture and resilience of cyber-physical systems. The attacker’s perspective is most often achieved by cyber-security experts (e.g., red teams) who critically challenge and analyze the system from an adversarial stance. Unfortunately, the knowledge and experience of cyber-security experts can be inconsistent leading to situations where there are gaps in the security assessment of a given system. Structured security review processes (such as TAM, Mission Aware, STPA-SEC, and STPA-SafeSec) attempt to standardize the review processes to impart consistency across an organization or application domain. However, with most security review processes, the …

Implementation Of A Hierarchical, Embedded, Cyber Attack Detection System For Spi Devices On Unmanned Aerial Systems, Jeremy J. Price

Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) create security concerns as their roles expand in commercial, military, and consumer spaces. The need to secure these systems is recognized in the architecture for a Hierarchical, Embedded, Cyber Attack Detection (HECAD) system. HECAD passively monitors the communication between a flight controller and all its peripherals like sensors and actuators. It ensures the functionality of a UAS is within the set of defined behavior and reports all potential problems, whether the errors were caused by cyber attacks or other physical faults. A portion of the design for Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) devices on board a flight …

Systematic Model-Based Design Assurance And Property-Based Fault Injection For Safety Critical Digital Systems, Athira Varma Jayakumar

Theses and Dissertations

With advances in sensing, wireless communications, computing, control, and automation technologies, we are witnessing the rapid uptake of Cyber-Physical Systems across many applications including connected vehicles, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, smart homes etc. Many of these applications are safety-critical in nature and they depend on the correct and safe execution of software and hardware that are intrinsically subject to faults. These faults can be design faults (Software Faults, Specification faults, etc.) or physically occurring faults (hardware failures, Single-event-upsets, etc.). Both types of faults must be addressed during the design and development of these critical systems. Several safety-critical industries have widely adopted …

Leveraging Peer-To-Peer Energy Sharing For Resource Optimization In Mobile Social Networks, Aashish Dhungana

Theses and Dissertations

Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MSNs) enable the interaction of mobile users in the vicinity through various short-range wireless communication technologies (e.g., Bluetooth, WiFi) and let them discover and exchange information directly or in ad hoc manner. Despite their promise to enable many exciting applications, limited battery capacity of mobile devices has become the biggest impediment to these appli- cations. The recent breakthroughs in the areas of wireless power transfer (WPT) and rechargeable lithium batteries promise the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing (i.e., the transfer of energy from the battery of one member of the mobile network to the battery of …

Data Science Methods For Standardization, Safety, And Quality Assurance In Radiation Oncology, Khajamoinuddin Syed

Theses and Dissertations

Radiation oncology is the field of medicine that deals with treating cancer patients through ionizing radiation. The clinical modality or technique used to treat the cancer patients in the radiation oncology domain is referred to as radiation therapy. Radiation therapy aims to deliver precisely measured dose irradiation to a defined tumor volume (target) with as minimal damage as possible to surrounding healthy tissue (organs-at-risk), resulting in eradication of the tumor, high quality of life, and prolongation of survival. A typical radiotherapy process requires the use of different clinical systems at various stages of the workflow. The data generated in these …

Let’S Face It: The Effect Of Orthognathic Surgery On Facial Recognition Algorithm Analysis, Carolyn Bradford Dragon

Theses and Dissertations

Aim: To evaluate the ability of a publicly available facial recognition application program interface (API) to calculate similarity scores for pre- and post-surgical photographs of patients undergoing orthognathic surgeries. Our primary objective was to identify which surgical procedure(s) had the greatest effect(s) on similarity score.

Methods: Standard treatment progress photographs for 25 retrospectively identified, orthodontic-orthognathic patients were analyzed using the API to calculate similarity scores between the pre- and post-surgical photographs. Photographs from two pre-surgical timepoints were compared as controls. Both relaxed and smiling photographs were included in the study to assess for the added impact of facial pose on …

The Evaluation Of An Android Permission Management System Based On Crowdsourcing, Pulkit Rustgi

Theses and Dissertations

Mobile and web application security, particularly concerning the area of data privacy, has received much attention from the public in recent years. Most applications are installed without disclosing full information to users and clearly stating what they have access to. This often raises concerns when users become aware of unnecessary information being collected or stored. Unfortunately, most users have little to no technical knowledge in regard to what permissions should be granted and can only rely on their intuition and past experiences to make relatively uninformed decisions. DroidNet, a crowdsource based Android recommendation tool and framework, is a proposed avenue …

Energy Efficient Spintronic Device For Neuromorphic Computation, Md Ali Azam

Theses and Dissertations

Future computing will require significant development in new computing device paradigms. This is motivated by CMOS devices reaching their technological limits, the need for non-Von Neumann architectures as well as the energy constraints of wearable technologies and embedded processors. The first device proposal, an energy-efficient voltage-controlled domain wall device for implementing an artificial neuron and synapse is analyzed using micromagnetic modeling. By controlling the domain wall motion utilizing spin transfer or spin orbit torques in association with voltage generated strain control of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy in the presence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), different positions of the domain wall are realized …

Blockchain Scalability And Security, Tuyet Duong

Theses and Dissertations

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have proven to be a phenomenal success. The underlying techniques hold huge promise to change the future of financial transactions, and eventually the way people and companies compute, collaborate, and interact. At the same time, the current Bitcoin-like proof-of-work based blockchain systems are facing many challenges. In more detail, a huge amount of energy/electricity is needed for maintaining the Bitcoin blockchain. In addition, their security holds if the majority of the computing power is under the control of honest players. However, this assumption has been seriously challenged recently and Bitcoin-like systems will fail when this assumption is …

Efficient Information Dissemination In Vehicular Networks With Privacy Protection, Xiaolu Cheng

Theses and Dissertations

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a key component of intelligent transportation System (ITS). In VANETs, vehicles and roadside units exchange information for the purpose of navigation, safe driving, entertainment and so on. The high mobility of vehicles makes efficient and private communications in VANETs a big challenge.

Improving the performance of information dissemination while protecting data privacy is studied in this research. Meet-Table based information dissemination method is first proposed, so as to improve the information dissemination, and to efficiently distribute information via utilizing roadside units, Cloud Computing, and Fog Computing. A clustering algorithm is proposed as well, to …

Toward Biologically-Inspired Self-Healing, Resilient Architectures For Digital Instrumentation And Control Systems And Embedded Devices, Shawkat Sabah Khairullah

Theses and Dissertations

Digital Instrumentation and Control (I&C) systems in safety-related applications of next generation industrial automation systems require high levels of resilience against different fault classes. One of the more essential concepts for achieving this goal is the notion of resilient and survivable digital I&C systems. In recent years, self-healing concepts based on biological physiology have received attention for the design of robust digital systems. However, many of these approaches have not been architected from the outset with safety in mind, nor have they been targeted for the automation community where a significant need exists. This dissertation presents a new self-healing digital …

Consuming Digital Debris In The Plasticene, Stephen R. Parks

Theses and Dissertations

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D …

Improving The Performance And Energy Efficiency Of Emerging Memory Systems, Yuhua Guo

Theses and Dissertations

Modern main memory is primarily built using dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips. As DRAM chip scales to higher density, there are mainly three problems that impede DRAM scalability and performance improvement. First, DRAM refresh overhead grows from negligible to severe, which limits DRAM scalability and causes performance degradation. Second, although memory capacity has increased dramatically in past decade, memory bandwidth has not kept pace with CPU performance scaling, which has led to the memory wall problem. Third, DRAM dissipates considerable power and has been reported to account for as much as 40% of the total system energy and this …

A Hierarchical Architectural Framework For Securing Unmanned Aerial Systems, Matthew Leccadito

Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are becoming more widely used in the new era of evolving technology; increasing performance while decreasing size, weight, and cost. A UAS equipped with a Flight Control System (FCS) that can be used to fly semi- or fully-autonomous is a prime example of a Cyber Physical and Safety Critical system. Current Cyber-Physical defenses against malicious attacks are structured around security standards for best practices involving the development of protocols and the digital software implementation. Thus far, few attempts have been made to embed security into the architecture of the system considering security as a holistic problem. …

Respiratory Prediction And Image Quality Improvement Of 4d Cone Beam Ct And Mri For Lung Tumor Treatments, Seonyeong Park

Theses and Dissertations

Identification of accurate tumor location and shape is highly important in lung cancer radiotherapy, to improve the treatment quality by reducing dose delivery errors. Because a lung tumor moves with the patient's respiration, breathing motion should be correctly analyzed and predicted during the treatment for prevention of tumor miss or undesirable treatment toxicity. Besides, in Image-Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT), the tumor motion causes difficulties not only in delivering accurate dose, but also in assuring superior quality of imaging techniques such as four-dimensional (4D) Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) and 4D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Specifically, 4D CBCT used in CBCT …

Towards Design And Analysis For High-Performance And Reliable Ssds, Qianbin Xia

Theses and Dissertations

NAND Flash-based Solid State Disks have many attractive technical merits, such as low power consumption, light weight, shock resistance, sustainability of hotter operation regimes, and extraordinarily high performance for random read access, which makes SSDs immensely popular and be widely employed in different types of environments including portable devices, personal computers, large data centers, and distributed data systems.

However, current SSDs still suffer from several critical inherent limitations, such as the inability of in-place-update, asymmetric read and write performance, slow garbage collection processes, limited endurance, and degraded write performance with the adoption of MLC and TLC techniques. To alleviate these …

Omni-Directional Infrared 3d Reconstruction And Tracking Of Human Targets, Emrah Benli

Theses and Dissertations

Omni-directional (O-D) infrared (IR) vision is an effective capability for mobile systems in robotics, due to its advantages: illumination invariance, wide field-of-view, ease of identifying heat-emitting objects, and long term tracking without interruption. Unfortunately, O-D IR sensors have low resolution, low frame rates, high cost, sensor noise, and an increase in tracking time. In order to overcome these disadvantages, we propose an autonomous system application in indoor scenarios including 1) Dynamic 3D Reconstruction (D3DR) of the target view in real time images, 2) Human Behavior-based Target Tracking from O-D thermal images, 3) Thermal Multisensor Fusion (TMF), and 4) Visual Perception …

Improving The Performance And Time-Predictability Of Gpus, Yijie Huangfu

Theses and Dissertations

Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) are originally mainly designed to accelerate graphic applications. Now the capability of GPUs to accelerate applications that can be parallelized into a massive number of threads makes GPUs the ideal accelerator for boosting the performance of such kind of general-purpose applications. Meanwhile it is also very promising to apply GPUs to embedded and real-time applications as well, where high throughput and intensive computation are also needed.

However, due to the different architecture and programming model of GPUs, how to fully utilize the advanced architectural features of GPUs to boost the performance and how to analyze the …

Autonomous Navigation With Obstacle Avoidance For Unmanned Aircraft Systems Using Milp, James A. Devens

Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous coordination among multiple aerial vehicles to ensure a collision free airspace is a critical aspect of today’s airspace. With the rise of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the military and commercial sectors, obstacle avoidance in a densely populated airspace is necessary. This thesis investigates finding optimal or near-optimal trajectories in real-time for aircraft in complex airspaces containing a large number of obstacles. The solution for the trajectories is described as a linear program subject to mixed integer constraints, known as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). The resulting MILP problem is solved in real time using a well-known, public …