The foundation upon which any cooperative rests is the economic need for it as a business enterprise. The existence of such a need cannot by itself provide the basis for a thriving cooperative. Not only mus.t the need exist, but the members or the promoters must through realistic and diligent...
In this thesis I explore the ways in which twenty-first century Americans have access
to Geoffrey Chaucer and his works. I look at issues surrounding Chaucer within the
canon debate, high school history and literature textbooks, and Chaucer in popular
culture, such as in movies like A Knight's Tale. I...
This thesis presents a decentralized communication planning algorithm for cooperative terrain-based navigation (dec-TBN) with autonomous underwater vehicles. The proposed algorithm uses forward simulation to approximate the value of communicating at each time step. The simulations are used to build a directed acyclic graph that can be searched to provide a...
Multi-robot systems are versatile and extremely capable of exploration tasks in complex environments. Increasingly sophisticated planners, which incorporate new features of a multi-robot system, are necessary for the operation of the systems. Marsupial robots are multi-robot systems consisting of a carrier robot (e.g., a ground vehicle), which is highly capable...
My thesis, entitled “The Clerk’s Tale: Literal Monstrosities and Allegorical Problems,” argues that Chaucer’s Clerk is engaging both sides of a binary system. The Clerk has situated himself in a precarious position between two major schools of thought in the medieval culture, Franciscan and Dominican; the former promotes the will...
Human-robot teams are invaluable for mapping unknown environments, exploring difficult-to-reach areas, and manipulating inaccessible equipment. However, guiding autonomous robots requires dealing with these dynamic domains while synthesizing a significant amount of data and balancing competing objectives. Current mission planning methods often involve manually specifying low-level parameters of the mission, such...
Breeding ecology of long-billed curlews in Umatilla and Morrow Counties, Oregon, was studied during the spring and summer of 1978
and 1979. The first curlews were observed in the study areas on 16 and 19 March of 1978 and 1979, respectively. Earliest clutch completion and onset of incubation was on...
In shared autonomy, a robot and human user both have some level of control in order to achieve a shared goal. Choosing the balance of control given to the user and the robot can be a challenging problem since different users have different preferences and vary in skill levels when...
Underwater robots beneath ocean waves can benefit from feedforward control to reduce position error. This thesis proposes a method using Model Predictive Control (MPC) to predict and counteract future disturbances from an ocean wave field. The MPC state estimator employs a Linear Wave Theory (LWT) solver to approximate the component...
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has grown out of traditional research and military applications and has captivated the commercial and consumer markets, showing the ability to perform a spectrum of autonomous functions. This technology has the capability of saving lives in search and rescue, fighting wildfires in environmental monitoring, and...