Computer Engineering Commons^™

A Study On Facility Planning Using Discrete Event Simulation: Case Study Of A Grain Delivery Terminal., Sarah M. Asio

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The application of traditional approaches to the design of efficient facilities can be tedious and time consuming when uncertainty and a number of constraints exist. Queuing models and mathematical programming techniques are not able to capture the complex interaction between resources, the environment and space constraints for dynamic stochastic processes. In the following study discrete event simulation is applied to the facility planning process for a grain delivery terminal. The discrete event simulation approach has been applied to studies such as capacity planning and facility layout for a gasoline station and evaluating the resource requirements for a manufacturing facility. To …

Computational Efficiency Of A Hybrid Mass Concentration And Spherical Harmonic Modeling, Nathan Piepgrass

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Through Spherical Harmonics, one can describe complex gravitational fields. However as the order and degree of the spherical harmonics increases, the computation speed rises exponentially. In addition, for onboard applications of spherical harmonics, the processors are radiation hardened in order to mitigate negative effects of the space environment on electronics. But, those processors have outdated processing speeds, resulting in a slower onboard spherical harmonic program.

This thesis examines a partial solution to the slow computation speed of spherical harmonics programs. The partial solution was to supplant the gravity models in the flight software. The spherical harmonics gravity model can be …

Kernelized Locality-Sensitive Hashing For Fast Image Landmark Association, Mark A. Weems

Theses and Dissertations

As the concept of war has evolved, navigation in urban environments where GPS may be degraded is increasingly becoming more important. Two existing solutions are vision-aided navigation and vision-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). The problem, however, is that vision-based navigation techniques can require excessive amounts of memory and increased computational complexity resulting in a decrease in speed. This research focuses on techniques to improve such issues by speeding up and optimizing the data association process in vision-based SLAM. Specifically, this work studies the current methods that algorithms use to associate a current robot pose to that of one previously …

Polarimetric Enhancements To Electro-Optical Aided Navigation Techniques, Jeremiah D. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Navigation in indoor and urban environments by small unmanned systems is a topic of interest for the Air Force. The Advanced Navigation Technology Center at the Air Force Institute of Technology is continually looking for novel approaches to navigation in GPS deprived environments. Inertial sensors have been coupled with image aided concepts, such as feature tracking, with good results. However, feature density in areas with large, flat, smooth surfaces tends to be low. Polarimetric sensors have been used for surface reconstruction, surface characterization and outdoor navigation. This thesis combines aspects of some of these algorithms along with a realistic, micro-facet …

Adaptive Discrete-Time Controller Design With Neural Network For Hypersonic Flight Vehicle Via Back-Stepping, Bin Xu

Bin Xu

In this article, the adaptive neural controller in discrete time is investigated for the longitudinal dynamics of a generic hypersonic flight vehicle. The dynamics are decomposed into the altitude subsystem and the velocity subsystem. The altitude subsystem is transformed into the strict-feedback form from which the discrete-time model is derived by the first-order Taylor expansion. The virtual control is designed with nominal feedback and neural network (NN) approximation via back-stepping. Meanwhile, one adaptive NN controller is designed for the velocity subsystem. To avoid the circular construction problem in the practical control, the design of coefficients adopts the upper bound instead …

Adaptive Neural Control Based On Hgo For Hypersonic Flight Vehicles, Bin Xu

Bin Xu

This paper describes the design of adaptive neural controller for the longitudinal dynamics of a generic hypersonic flight vehicle (HFV) which are decomposed into two functional systems, namely the altitude subsystem and the velocity subsystem. For each subsystem, one adaptive neural controller is investigated based on the normal output-feedback formulation. For the altitude subsystem, the high gain observer (HGO) is taken to estimate the unknown newly defined states. Only one neural network (NN) is employed to approximate the lumped uncertain system nonlinearity during the controller design which is considerably simpler than the ones based on back-stepping scheme with the strict-feedback …

Task Allocation For Multi-Spacecraft Cooperation Based On Estimation Of Distribution Algorithm, Bin Xu

Bin Xu

One two-stage task allocation strategy is proposed for multi-spacecraft cooperation during the long-range orbit transfer with two impulses. This paper focuses on the task value maximum and cost minimum optimization by assigning spacecraft to different task. At the first stage time and energy cost are considered based on the spacecraft dynamics. The optimization result is together with the target value as the factor for the task allocation model at the second stage. The optimization is processed separately in continuous and discrete time domain with estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA). Different task allocation mode is formulated and the strategy is verified …

Composite Control Based On Optimal Torque Control And Adaptive Kriging Control For The Crab Rover, Bin Xu

Bin Xu

Terrainability is mostly dependant on the suspension mechanism and the control of a space rover. For the six wheeled CRAB rover, this paper presents the composite control design with torque control and adaptive Kriging control to improve the terrainability, somewhat related to minimizing heel slip. As CRAB is moving slowly, the torque control is processed by minimizing the variance of the required friction coefficient based on the static model. Adaptive Kriging control is used to track the commanded velocity. The system uncertainty is compensated by Kriging estimation based on the velocity dynamics. Experiment results with two different tires show the …

Adaptive Hypersonic Flight Control Via Back-Stepping And Kriging Estimation, Bin Xu

Bin Xu

This paper investigates the adaptive Kriging controller for the longitudinal dynamics of a generic hypersonic flight vehicle (HFV). For the altitude subsystem, the dynamics are transformed into the strict-feedback form where the backstepping scheme is employed. Considering the nonlinearity of the dynamics, the nominal feedback is included in the controller while Kriging system is designed to estimate the uncertainty. With the proposed controller, the almost surely bounded stability is guaranteed. The simulation study is presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.

A Midsummer Night’S Dream (With Flying Robots), Robin Murphy, Dylan Shell, Amy Guerin, Brittany Duncan, Benjamin Fine, Kevin Pratt, Takis Zourntos

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Seven flying robot “fairies” joined human actors in the Texas A&M production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production was a collaboration between the departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Theater Arts. The collaboration was motivated by two assertions. First, that the performing arts have principles for creating believable agents that will transfer to robots. Second, the theater is a natural testbed for evaluating the response of untrained human groups (both actors and the audience) to robots interacting with humans in shared spaces, i.e., were believable agents created? The production used two types …

Evidence Supporting Measure Of Similarity For Reducing The Complexity In Information Fusion, Xinde Li, Jean Dezert, Florentin Smarandache, Xinhan Huang

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

This paper proposes a new solution for reducing the number of sources of evidence to be combined in order to diminish the complexity of the fusion process required in some applications where the real-time constraint and strong computing resource limitation are of prime importance. The basic idea consists in selecting, among the whole set of sources of evidence, only the biggest subset of sources which are not too contradicting based on a criterion of Evidence Supporting Measure of Similarity (ESMS) in order to process solely the coherent information received. The ESMS criterion serves actually as a generic tool for outlier …