The CSE Colloquium Series will host Dr. Eric Frew, an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Director of the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) at the University of Colorado Boulder on Friday, October 10 at 3:30 p.m. in 117 Bessey Hall. Graduate students can get colloquium credit for attending.
Abstract:
The energy-aware airborne dynamic, data-driven application system (EA-DDDAS) performs persistent sampling in complex atmospheric conditions by exploiting wind energy using the dynamic data-driven application system paradigm. The main challenge for future airborne sampling missions is operation with tight integration of physical and computational resources over wireless communication networks, in complex atmospheric conditions. The physical resources considered here include sensor platforms, particularly mobile Doppler radar and unmanned aircraft, the complex conditions in which they operate, and the region of interest. Autonomous operation requires distributed computational effort connected by layered wireless communication. Onboard decision-making and coordination algorithms can be enhanced by atmospheric models that assimilate input from physics-based models and wind fields derived from multiple sources. These models are generally too complex to be run onboard the aircraft, so they need to be executed in ground vehicles in the field, and connected over broadband or other wireless links back to the field. Finally, the wind field environment drives strong interaction between the computational and physical systems, both as a challenge to autonomous path planning algorithms and as a novel energy source that can be exploited to improve system range and endurance. This seminar will describe collaborative efforts between researchers at University of Colorado and the University of Nebraska to implementation a complete EA-DDDAS. Results will be presented from previous field deployments of unmanned aircraft to show the evolution of the EA-DDDAS concept. Preliminary flight test results deploying the EA-DDDAS to target coherent boundary-layer structures will also be described.
Bio:
Dr. Eric W. Frew is an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Director of the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU). He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 1995 and his M.S and Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in 1996 and 2003, respectively. Dr. Frew has been designing and deploying unmanned aircraft systems for over ten years. His research efforts focus on autonomous flight of heterogeneous unmanned aircraft systems; distributed information-gathering by mobile robots; miniature self-deploying systems; and guidance and control of unmanned aircraft in complex atmospheric phenomena. Dr. Frew was co-leader of the team that performed the first-ever sampling of a severe supercell thunderstorm by an unmanned aircraft. He is currently the CU Site Director for the National Science Foundation Industry / University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. He received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2009 and was selected for the 2010 DARPA Computer Science Study Group.