Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology

About: Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology is a education organization based out in New York, New York, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Gravitational microlensing & Planetary system. The organization has 727 authors who have published 708 publications receiving 14082 citations. The organization is also known as: College of Aeronautics.

Paper 1: A Review of Analytical Studies of Reacting or Relaxing Gas Flows

Abstract: The status of the analytical, as opposed to the purely numerical, approach to problems of reacting or relaxing gas flows is examined by way of a summary of the significant results which have been achieved by this means to date. Much of the work deals (inevitably) with a review of the linear theory, although more exact treatments of nozzle flows, shock wave structure, characteristics and first-order wave theories are also dealt with.Finally an attempt is made to assess the limitations and probable lines of development of the analytical study of real gas flows.

Trust-Aware Emergency Response for A Resilient Human-Swarm Cooperative System

Abstract: A human-swarm cooperative system, which mixes multiple robots and a human supervisor to form a mission team, has been widely used for emergent scenarios such as criminal tracking and victim assistance. These scenarios are related to human safety and require a robot team to quickly transit from the current undergoing task into the new emergent task. This sudden mission change brings difficulty in robot motion adjustment and increases the risk of performance degradation of the swarm. Trust in human-human collaboration reflects a general expectation of the collaboration; based on the trust humans mutually adjust their behaviors for better teamwork. Inspired by this, in this research, a trust-aware reflective control (Trust-R), was developed for a robot swarm to understand the collaborative mission and calibrate its motions accordingly for better emergency response. Typical emergent tasks “transit between area inspection tasks”, “response to emergent target - car accident” in social security with eight fault-related situations were designed to simulate robot deployments. A human user study with 50 volunteers was conducted to model trust and assess swarm performance. Trust-R's effectiveness in supporting a robot team for emergency response was validated by improved task performance and increased trust scores.

An Attention Transfer Model for Human-Assisted Failure Avoidance in Robot Manipulations

Abstract: Due to real-world dynamics and hardware uncertainty, robots inevitably fail in task executions, resulting in undesired or even dangerous executions. In order to avoid failures and improve robot performance, it is critical to identify and correct abnormal robot executions at an early stage. However, due to limited reasoning capability and knowledge storage, it is challenging for robots to self-diagnose and - correct their own abnormality in both planning and executing. To improve robot self diagnosis capability, in this research a novel human-to-robot attention transfer (H2R-AT) method was developed to identify robot manipulation errors by leveraging human instructions. H2R-AT was developed by fusing attention mapping mechanism into a novel stacked neural networks model, transferring human verbal attention into robot visual attention. With the attention transfer, a robot understands what and where human concerns are to identify and correct abnormal manipulations. Two representative task scenarios: “serve water for a human in a kitchen” and “pick up a defective gear in a factory” were designed in a simulation framework CRAIhri with abnormal robot manipulations; and 252 volunteers were recruited to provide about 12000 verbal reminders to learn and test H2R-AT. The method effectiveness was validated by the high accuracy of 73.68% in transferring attention, and the high accuracy of 66.86% in avoiding grasping failures.

Integrated Design Patterns for Control System Analysis and Synthesis

Abstract: A control system is a device that regulates a system's performance over time to provide a desired output based on an input. Designing such a system can be a tedious and difficult process due to the complex nature of control and its interdependencies. This paper presents an innovative approach to integrate several system design patterns into a software package that can generate multiple designed results based on the system performance specifications provided by a front-end user. The purpose of developing the software package is to allow a wider range of users from various engineering fields to apply control theories into their practical system designs, such as an autonomous ground vehicle system, a chemical processing system, a manufacturing or food production line. Especially, when the software design environment is working with a data acquisition board, it will be a powerful tool for real-time control system analysis and synthesis.