Ocean wave energy is a new and developing field of renewable energy with great potential. The energy contained in one meter of an average wave off the coast of Newport Oregon could supply dozens of homes with electricity. However, ocean waves are usually quite irregular which leads to large bursts...
Customer requirements and engineering specifications will influence the direction of the design in any product, so it is crucial to make the requirements as stable as possible so quality designs can be produced on time within a budget. It would be optimal for requirements and specifications to remain constant but...
Through passive adaptation to incidental flow, flexible aerodynamic surfaces exploit effects of increased lift, delayed stall and disturbance rejection. Wings of birds, bats, and insects exhibit these passive effects, and at the same time through the use of structural state feedback sensed from the loads on the wing, active control...
Direct red Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) Turbine hybrid plants have the potential to dramatically increase power plant efficiency, decrease emissions, and provide fast response to transient loads. The US Department of Energy's (DOE) Hybrid Performance Project is an experimental hybrid SOFC plant, built at the National
Energy Technology Laboratory...
Tensegrity structures are composed of pure compressional elements that are connected via a network of pure tensional elements. The concept of tensegrity promises numerous advantages to the field of robotics. Tensegrity robots are, however, notoriously difficult to control due to their oscillatory nature and nonlinear interaction between the components. Multiagent...
Autonomous multiagent teams can be used in complex exploration tasks to both expedite the exploration and improve the efficiency. However, use of multiagent systems presents additional challenges. Specifically, in domains where the agents' actions are tightly coupled, coordinating multiple agents to achieve cooperative behavior at the group level is difficult....
Recent advancements in joining operations and additive manufacturing now allow complex metal parts to be built up from raw materials, as opposed to being machined down from solid blocks. This not only opens up the design space, but also allows for much more efficient manufacturing. By decomposing a complex part...