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Air Force Institute of Technology

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Articles 91 - 120 of 413

Full-Text Articles in Computer Engineering

Framework For Industrial Control System Honeypot Network Traffic Generation, Htein A. Lin Mar 2017

Framework For Industrial Control System Honeypot Network Traffic Generation, Htein A. Lin

Theses and Dissertations

Defending critical infrastructure assets is an important but extremely difficult and expensive task. Historically, decoys have been used very effectively to distract attackers and in some cases convince an attacker to reveal their attack strategy. Several researchers have proposed the use of honeypots to protect programmable logic controllers, specifically those used to support critical infrastructure. However, most of these honeypot designs are static systems that wait for a would-be attacker. To be effective, honeypot decoys need to be as realistic as possible. This paper introduces a proof-of-concept honeypot network traffic generator that mimics genuine control systems. Experiments are conducted using …

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Applying Cyber Threat Intelligence To Industrial Control Systems, Matthew P. Sibiga Mar 2017

Applying Cyber Threat Intelligence To Industrial Control Systems, Matthew P. Sibiga

Theses and Dissertations

A cybersecurity initiative known as cyber threat intelligence (CTI) has recently been developed and deployed. The overall goal of this new technology is to help protect network infrastructures. Threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) have also been created to help facilitate CTI effectiveness within organizations. There are many benefits that both can achieve within the information technology (IT) sector. The industrial control system (ICS) sector can also benefit from these technologies as most ICS networks are connected to IT networks. CTI and TIPs become resourceful when using indicators of compromise (IOCs) from known ICS malware attacks and an open source intrusion detection …

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Autoprov: An Automated File Provenance Collection Tool, Ryan A. Good Mar 2017

Autoprov: An Automated File Provenance Collection Tool, Ryan A. Good

Theses and Dissertations

A file's provenance is a detailing of its origins and activities. There are tools available that are useful in maintaining the provenance of a file. Unfortunately for digital forensics, these tools require prior installation on the computer of interest while provenance generating events happen. The presented tool addresses this by reconstructing a file's provenance from several temporal artifacts. It identifies relevant temporal and user correlations between these artifacts, and presents them to the user. A variety of predefined use cases and real world data are tested against to demonstrate that this software allows examiners to draw useful conclusions about the …

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Development Of The Architecture Cost Effectiveness Framework And Application To Open Systems Architectures, Donald A. Barrett Mar 2017

Development Of The Architecture Cost Effectiveness Framework And Application To Open Systems Architectures, Donald A. Barrett

Theses and Dissertations

The Modular Open System Approach (MOSA) is an initiative to, among other things, reduce cost and schedule for acquisitions programs. While programs have experienced savings using MOSA, the majority of programs have not, in part due to a lack of a logical method for evaluating architecture alternatives. This research develops the Architecture Cost Effectiveness Framework (ACEF), which combines multi-attribute utility analysis with cost effectiveness analysis throughout the program lifecycle. Step 1 is the establishment of a business strategy that includes an Attribute Hierarchy of selected operational requirements. The business strategy also defines Lifecycle Utility Reference Profiles (LURPs) that document changing …

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A Framework For Categorization Of Industrial Control System Cyber Training Environments, Evan G. Plumley Mar 2017

A Framework For Categorization Of Industrial Control System Cyber Training Environments, Evan G. Plumley

Theses and Dissertations

First responders and professionals in hazardous occupations undergo training and evaluations for the purpose of mitigating risk and damage. For example, helicopter pilots train with multiple categorized simulations that increase in complexity before flying a real aircraft. However in the industrial control cyber incident response domain, where incident response professionals help detect, respond and recover from cyber incidents, no official categorization of training environments exist. To address this gap, this thesis provides a categorization of industrial control training environments based on realism. Four levels of environments are proposed and mapped to Blooms Taxonomy. This categorization will help organizations determine which …

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Small Fixed-Wing Aerial Positioning Using Inter-Vehicle Ranging Combined With Visual Odometry, Benjamin M. Fain Mar 2017

Small Fixed-Wing Aerial Positioning Using Inter-Vehicle Ranging Combined With Visual Odometry, Benjamin M. Fain

Theses and Dissertations

There has been increasing interest in developing the ability for small unmanned aerial systems (SUAS) to be able to operate in environments where GPS is not available. This research considers the case of a larger aircraft loitering above a smaller GPS-denied SUAS. This larger aircraft is assumed to have greater resources which can overcome the GPS jamming and provide range information to the SUAS flying a mission below. This research demonstrates that using a ranging update combined with an aircraft motion model and visual odometry can greatly improve the accuracy of a SUASs estimated position in a GPS-denied environment.

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Active Response Using Host-Based Intrusion Detection System And Software-Defined Networking, Jonathon S. Goodgion Mar 2017

Active Response Using Host-Based Intrusion Detection System And Software-Defined Networking, Jonathon S. Goodgion

Theses and Dissertations

This research proposes AHNSR: Active Host-based Network Security Response by utilizing Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to enhance system security by allowing dynamic active response and reconstruction from a global network topology perspective. Responses include traffic redirection, host quarantining, filtering, and more. A testable SDN-controlled network is constructed with multiple hosts, OpenFlow enabled switches, and a Floodlight controller, all linked to a custom, novel interface for the Open-Source SECurity (OSSEC) HIDS framework. OSSEC is implemented in a server-agent architecture, allowing scalability and OS independence. System effectiveness is evaluated against the following factors: alert density and a …

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A Framework For Understanding, Prioritizing, And Applying Systems Security Engineering Processes, Activities, And Tasks, Stephen Khou Mar 2017

A Framework For Understanding, Prioritizing, And Applying Systems Security Engineering Processes, Activities, And Tasks, Stephen Khou

Theses and Dissertations

Current systems security practices lack an effective approach to prioritize and tailor systems security efforts to develop and field secure systems in challenging operational environments, which results in business and mission stakeholders becoming more susceptible to an array of disruptive events. This work informs Systems Engineers on recent developments in the field of system security engineering and provides a framework for more fully understanding the application of Systems Security Engineering (SSE) processes, activities, and tasks as described in the recently released National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-160. This SSE framework uniquely offers a repeatable and tailorable …

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Preprocessing Techniques To Support Event Detection Data Fusion On Social Media Data, Brandon T. Davis Jun 2016

Preprocessing Techniques To Support Event Detection Data Fusion On Social Media Data, Brandon T. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on collection and preprocessing of streaming social media feeds for metadata as well as the visual and textual information. Today, news media has been the main source of immediate news events, large and small. However, the information conveyed on these news sources is delayed due to the lack of proximity and general knowledge of the event. Such news have started relying on social media sources for initial knowledge of these events. Previous works focused on captured textual data from social media as a data source to detect events. This preprocessing framework postures to facilitate the data fusion …

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Data Quality Challenges In Distributed Live-Virtual-Constructive Test Environments, Jeremy R. Millar, Douglas D. Hodson, Gilbert L. Peterson, Darryl K. Ahner Apr 2016

Data Quality Challenges In Distributed Live-Virtual-Constructive Test Environments, Jeremy R. Millar, Douglas D. Hodson, Gilbert L. Peterson, Darryl K. Ahner

Faculty Publications

Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC) simulations are complex systems comprising a combination of live (real people operating real equipment), virtual (real people operating simulated equipment or vice versa), and constructive (wholly simulated) entities. Nodes in the system support the simulation of one or more entities and are often geographically distributed to leverage unique assets (e.g., physical test range space or high-fidelity full motion simulators). Abstract excerpt © ACM

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Towards Automated Aerial Refueling: Real Time Position Estimation With Stereo Vision, Bradley D. Denby Mar 2016

Towards Automated Aerial Refueling: Real Time Position Estimation With Stereo Vision, Bradley D. Denby

Theses and Dissertations

Aerial refueling is essential to the United States Air Force (USAF) core mission of rapid global mobility. However, in-flight refueling is not available to remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) or unmanned aerial systems (UAS). As reliance on drones for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and other USAF core missions grows, the ability to automate aerial refueling for such systems becomes increasingly critical. New refueling platforms include sensors that could be used to estimate the relative position of an approaching aircraft. Relative position estimation is a key component to solving the automated aerial refueling (AAR) problem. Analysis of data from a one-seventh …

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A Service Oriented Architecture Approach For Global Positioning System Quality Of Service Monitoring, Stuart A. Everson Mar 2016

A Service Oriented Architecture Approach For Global Positioning System Quality Of Service Monitoring, Stuart A. Everson

Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on the development of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for monitoring the Global Positioning System (GPS) Standard Positioning Service (SPS) in near real time utilizing a Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) technique. A unique approach to developing the MCS SOA was developed that utilized both the Depart- ment of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) and the SOA Modeling Language (SoaML) guidance. The combination of these two frameworks resulted in generation of all the architecture products required to evaluate the SOA through the use of Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) techniques. Ultimately this research provides a feasibility analysis for utilization …

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Exposing Inter-Virtual Machine Networking Traffic To External Applications, Charles E. Byrd Mar 2016

Exposing Inter-Virtual Machine Networking Traffic To External Applications, Charles E. Byrd

Theses and Dissertations

Virtualization is a powerful and fast growing technology that is widely accepted throughout the computing industry. The Department of Defense has moved its focus to virtualization and looks to take advantage of virtualized hardware, software, and networks. Virtual environments provide many benefits but create both administrative and security challenges. The challenge of monitoring virtual networks is having visibility of inter-virtual machine (VM) traffic that is passed within a single virtual host. This thesis attempts to gain visibility and evaluate performance of inter-VM traffic in a virtual environment. Separate virtual networks are produced using VMWare ESXi and Citrix XenServer platforms. The …

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Dynamic Network Security Control Using Software Defined Networking, Michael C. Todd Mar 2016

Dynamic Network Security Control Using Software Defined Networking, Michael C. Todd

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis develops and implements a process to rapidly respond to host level security events using a host agent, Software Defined Networking and OpenFlow updates, role based flow classes, and Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol to automatically update configuration of switching devices and block malicious traffic. Results show flow table updates are made for all tested levels in less than 5.27 milliseconds and event completion time increased with treatment level as expected. As the number of events increases from 1,000 to 50,000, the design scales logarithmically caused mainly by message delivery time. Event processing throughput is limited primarily by the message …

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A Practical Wireless Exploitation Framework For Z-Wave Networks, Joseph L. Hall Mar 2016

A Practical Wireless Exploitation Framework For Z-Wave Networks, Joseph L. Hall

Theses and Dissertations

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a growing subset of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). WSNs reduce the cost of deployment over wired alternatives; consequently, use is increasing in home automation, critical infrastructure, smart metering, and security solutions. Few published works evaluate the security of proprietary WSN protocols due to the lack of low-cost and effective research tools. One such protocol is ITU-T G.9959-based Z-Wave, which maintains wide acceptance within the IoT market. This research utilizes an open source toolset, presented herein, called EZ-Wave to identify methods for exploiting Z-Wave devices and networks using Software-Defined Radios (SDR). Herein, techniques enabling …

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Airborne Directional Networking: Topology Control Protocol Design, Barry C. Geise Mar 2016

Airborne Directional Networking: Topology Control Protocol Design, Barry C. Geise

Theses and Dissertations

This research identifies and evaluates the impact of several architectural design choices in relation to airborne networking in contested environments related to autonomous topology control. Using simulation, we evaluate topology reconfiguration effectiveness using classical performance metrics for different point-to-point communication architectures. Our attention is focused on the design choices which have the greatest impact on reliability, scalability, and performance. In this work, we discuss the impact of several practical considerations of airborne networking in contested environments related to autonomous topology control modeling. Using simulation, we derive multiple classical performance metrics to evaluate topology reconfiguration effectiveness for different point-to-point communication architecture …

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System And Method For Identifying Electrical Properties Of Integrate Circuits, Mary Y. Lanzerotti Jan 2016

System And Method For Identifying Electrical Properties Of Integrate Circuits, Mary Y. Lanzerotti

AFIT Patents

A new method for displaying electrical properties for integrated circuit (IC) layout designs provides for improved human visualization of those properties and comparison of as designed layout design parameters to as specified layout design parameters and to as manufactured layout parameters. The method starts with a circuitry as designed layout in a first digital format, extracts values for electrical properties from that circuitry as designed layout then annotates those values back into the first digital format. The annotated circuitry as designed layout is then converted from the first digital format to a second digital format that can be converted to …

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Demonstration Of Inexact Computing Implemented In The Jpeg Compression Algorithm Using Probabilistic Boolean Logic Applied To Cmos Components, Christopher I. Allen Dec 2015

Demonstration Of Inexact Computing Implemented In The Jpeg Compression Algorithm Using Probabilistic Boolean Logic Applied To Cmos Components, Christopher I. Allen

Theses and Dissertations

Probabilistic computing offers potential improvements in energy, performance, and area compared with traditional digital design. This dissertation quantifies energy and energy-delay tradeoffs in digital adders, multipliers, and the JPEG image compression algorithm. This research shows that energy demand can be cut in half with noisesusceptible16-bit Kogge-Stone adders that deviate from the correct value by an average of 3 in 14 nanometer CMOS FinFET technology, while the energy-delay product (EDP) is reduced by 38 . This is achieved by reducing the power supply voltage which drives the noisy transistors. If a 19 average error is allowed, the adders are 13 times …

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Network Analysis With Stochastic Grammars, Alan C. Lin Sep 2015

Network Analysis With Stochastic Grammars, Alan C. Lin

Theses and Dissertations

Digital forensics requires significant manual effort to identify items of evidentiary interest from the ever-increasing volume of data in modern computing systems. One of the tasks digital forensic examiners conduct is mentally extracting and constructing insights from unstructured sequences of events. This research assists examiners with the association and individualization analysis processes that make up this task with the development of a Stochastic Context -Free Grammars (SCFG) knowledge representation for digital forensics analysis of computer network traffic. SCFG is leveraged to provide context to the low-level data collected as evidence and to build behavior profiles. Upon discovering patterns, the analyst …

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Novel Techniques For Secure Use Of Public Cloud Computing Resources, Kyle E. Stewart Sep 2015

Novel Techniques For Secure Use Of Public Cloud Computing Resources, Kyle E. Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

The federal government has an expressed interest in moving data and services to third party service providers in order to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, and potential cost savings. This approach is called cloud computing. The thesis for this research is that efficient techniques exist to support the secure use of public cloud computing resources by a large, federated enterprise. The primary contributions of this research are the novel cryptographic system MA-AHASBE (Multi-Authority Anonymous Hierarchical Attribute-Set Based Encryption), and the techniques used to incorporate MA-AHASBE in a real world application. Performance results indicate that while there is a cost …

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A Feasibility Study On The Application Of The Scriptgene Framework As An Anomaly Detection System In Industrial Control Systems, Charito M. Corvin Sep 2015

A Feasibility Study On The Application Of The Scriptgene Framework As An Anomaly Detection System In Industrial Control Systems, Charito M. Corvin

Theses and Dissertations

Recent events such as Stuxnet and the Shamoon Aramco have brought to light how vulnerable industrial control systems (ICSs) are to cyber attacks. Modern society relies heavily on critical infrastructure, including the electric power grid, water treatment facilities, and nuclear energy plants. Malicious attempts to disrupt, destroy and disable such systems can have devastating effects on a populations way of life, possibly leading to loss of life. The need to implement security controls in the ICS environment is more vital than ever. ICSs were not originally designed with network security in mind. Today, intrusion detection systems are employed to detect …

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An Analysis Of Conus Based Deployment Of Pseudolites For Positioning, Navigation And Timing (Pnt) Systems, Justin H. Deifel, Albert J. Pena Sep 2015

An Analysis Of Conus Based Deployment Of Pseudolites For Positioning, Navigation And Timing (Pnt) Systems, Justin H. Deifel, Albert J. Pena

Theses and Dissertations

The Global Positioning System (GPS) developed and operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) provides a way for users to determine position, navigation and timing (PNT). GPS provides an extraordinary capability that has become instrumental in all aspects of our day to day lives. As new technologies such as automated vehicles and unmanned aircraft continue to be developed, a reliable back up to GPS is required to ensure the PNT data generated in these systems is accurate. This research studies a potential architecture for deploying a nationwide network of ground based pseudolites that would act to supplement and backup …

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Generation Of Strategies For Environmental Deception In Two-Player Normal-Form Games, Howard E. Poston Jun 2015

Generation Of Strategies For Environmental Deception In Two-Player Normal-Form Games, Howard E. Poston

Theses and Dissertations

Methods of performing and defending against deceptive actions are a popular field of study in game theory; however, the focus is mostly on action deception in turn-based games. This work focuses on developing strategies for performing environmental deception in two-player, strategic-form games. Environmental deception is defined as deception where one player has the ability to change the other's perception of the state of the game through modification of their perception of the game's payoff matrix, similar to the use of camouflage. The main contributions of this research are an expansion of the definition of the stability of a Nash equilibrium …

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Counter Weapon Control, Brian J. Roadruck Mar 2015

Counter Weapon Control, Brian J. Roadruck

Theses and Dissertations

In this work, pursuit-evasion differential game theory is applied to the target defense scenario. The targets, attackers, and the defenders positional information is assumed to be known to the players. With positional information, a computational efficient method of strategy synthesis can be derived applying a differential game theory approach. We demonstrate that when non-optimal strategies are employed by one of the players, e.g. Line Of Sight guidance, the outcome will favor the players that employ the optimal strategy given by the solution of the pursuit-evasion differential game.

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The Theory And Application Of Privacy-Preserving Computation, Michael R. Clark Mar 2015

The Theory And Application Of Privacy-Preserving Computation, Michael R. Clark

Theses and Dissertations

Privacy is a growing concern in the digital world as more information becomes digital every day. Often the implications of how this information could be exploited for nefarious purposes are not explored until after the fact. The public is becoming more concerned about this. This dissertation introduces a new paradigm for tackling the problem, namely, transferable multiparty computation (T-MPC). T-MPC builds upon existing multiparty computation work yet allows some additional flexibility in the set of participants. T-MPC is orders of magnitude more efficient for certain applications. This greatly increases the scalability of the sizes of networks supported for privacy-preserving computation.

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Leveraging Human Insights By Combining Multi-Objective Optimization With Interactive Evolution, Joshua R. Christman Mar 2015

Leveraging Human Insights By Combining Multi-Objective Optimization With Interactive Evolution, Joshua R. Christman

Theses and Dissertations

Deceptive fitness landscapes are a growing concern for evolutionary computation. Recent work has shown that combining human insights with short-term evolution has a synergistic effect that accelerates the discovery of solutions. While humans provide rich insights, they fatigue easily. Previous work reduced the number of human evaluations by evolving a diverse set of candidates via intermittent searches for novelty. While successful at evolving solutions for a deceptive maze domain, this approach lacks the ability to measure what the human evaluator identifies as important. The key insight here is that multi-objective evolutionary algorithms foster diversity, serving as a surrogate for novelty, …

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Fpga Accelerated Discrete-Surf For Real-Time Homography Estimation, Andrew C. Leighner Mar 2015

Fpga Accelerated Discrete-Surf For Real-Time Homography Estimation, Andrew C. Leighner

Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes our hardware accelerated, FPGA implementation of SURF, named Discrete SURF, to support real-time homography estimation for close range aerial navigation. The SURF algorithm provides feature matches between a model and a scene which can be used to find the transformation between the camera and the model. Previous implementations of SURF have partially employed FPGAs to accelerate the feature detection stage of upright only image comparisons. We extend the work of previous implementations by providing an FPGA implementation that allows rotation during image comparisons in order to facilitate aerial navigation. We also expand beyond feature detection as the …

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Automatic Configuration Of Programmable Logic Controller Emulators, Phillip C. Warner Mar 2015

Automatic Configuration Of Programmable Logic Controller Emulators, Phillip C. Warner

Theses and Dissertations

Programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which are used to control much of the world's critical infrastructures, are highly vulnerable and exposed to the Internet. Many efforts have been undertaken to develop decoys, or honeypots, of these devices in order to characterize, attribute, or prevent attacks against Industrial Control Systems (ICS) networks. Unfortunately, since ICS devices typically are proprietary and unique, one emulation solution for a particular vendor's model will not likely work on other devices. Many previous efforts have manually developed ICS honeypots, but it is a very time intensive process. Thus, a scalable solution is needed in order to automatically …

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Robust Models For Operator Workload Estimation, Andrew M. Smith Mar 2015

Robust Models For Operator Workload Estimation, Andrew M. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

When human-machine system operators are overwhelmed, judicious employment of automation can be beneficial. Ideally, a system which can accurately estimate current operator workload can make better choices when to employ automation. Supervised machine learning models can be trained to estimate workload in real time from operator physiological data. Unfortunately, estimating operator workload using trained models is limited: using a model trained in one context can yield poor estimation of workload in another. This research examines the utility of three algorithms (linear regression, regression trees, and Artificial Neural Networks) in terms of cross-application workload prediction. The study is conducted for a …

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Characterization Of A Robotic Manipulator For Dynamic Wind Tunnel Applications, James C. Lancaster Mar 2015

Characterization Of A Robotic Manipulator For Dynamic Wind Tunnel Applications, James C. Lancaster

Theses and Dissertations

The newly acquired 6-DOF Motion Test Apparatus (MTA) was installed to perform dynamic wind tunnel testing in the AFIT Low Speed Wind Tunnel. Several complex motions revealed that the overall performance of the test rig needed improvement especially during small motions. The motions exposed that further enhancements would need to be performed individually for each joint. This research effort focused on the improvement of the MTA wrist roll motor and controller using a pitch oscillation. The controller software was improved using position feedback because the MTA wrist roll motor and controller exhibited reduced signal bias and amplitude attenuation. The enhanced …

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