Hydraulic power take-off (PTO) systems have been implemented in several wave energy converter (WEC) designs in recent years. Two popular hydraulic PTO configurations coupled to a point absorber hydrodynamic model are simulated in waves representative of an energetic sea state likely to be found in deep waters off the coast...
As a way to improve safety and economics, one area of research and commercialization of new nuclear power plants has focused on the development of small modular reactors (SMRs). NuScale Power has developed a 50 MWe natural convection cooling SMR coupled with a regenerative Rankine cycle. Current estimates place the...
A 1 kW series hybrid powertrain was developed at Oregon State University for use in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This powertrain was designed to give mission flexibility and increased flight time to fixed-wing vertical takeoff and landing UAVs and multirotor UAVs. The powertrain components, an internal combustion engine and a...
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....
Coordination is essential to achieving good performance in cooperative multiagent systems. To date, most work has focused on either implicit or explicit coordination mechanisms, while relatively little work has focused on the benefits of combining these two approaches. In this work we demonstrate that combining explicit and implicit mechanisms can...
Complex engineered systems design is a collaborative activity. To design a system, experts from the relevant disciplines must work together to create the best overall system from their individual components. This situation is analogous to a multiagent system in which agents solve individual parts of a larger problem. Current multiagent...
Coordination in large multiagent systems in order to achieve a system level goal is a critical challenge. Given the agents' intention to cooperate, there is no guarantee that the agent actions will lead to good system objective especially when the system becomes large. One of the primary difficulties in such...
Soft robotics utilizes compliant materials (such as rubber) to make robots that are flexible and safe around humans, however these materials present many practical manufacturing challenges. Current fabrication methods use molding techniques which limits the soft robot designs which could be fabricated and impacts part consistency. This defense introduces a...
Collective migration in animal groups is often guided by distributed leader agents that influence their peers by modulating their motion behaviors. Distributed leadership is a promising navigation strategy for artificial swarms, but designing the leaders’ controllers is difficult due to the swarm’s collective emergent behaviors. The presented research formulates a...
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...