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...
While robotic systems may have once been relegated to structured environments and automation style tasks, in recent years these boundaries have begun to erode. As robots begin to operate in largely unstructured environments, it becomes more difficult for them to effectively interpret their surroundings. As sensor technology improves, the amount...
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...
Deep learning has recently revolutionized robot perception in many canonical robotic applications, such as autonomous driving. However, a similar transformation has yet to occur in more harsh environments including underwater and underground. This is due in part to the difficulty in deploying robots in these environments, which lack large real...
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...
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...
Information gathering tasks, such as terrestrial search and rescue, aerial inspection, and marine monitoring, require robotic unmanned systems to make decisions on how to travel within an environment to maximize or minimize a path-dependent information objective function. The distribution of information throughout the environment is the result of various processes,...
Motion planning is a cornerstone of autonomous robots, enabling robots to safely and efficiently perform tasks such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and manipulation. However, as the field of robotics matures, robotic systems are being developed that (1) are challenging to analytically model, (2) require computationally expensive model-based controllers, and...
There is growing commercial interest in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments, specifically for package delivery applications. However, the size, complexity and sheer numbers of expected UAVs makes conventional air traffic management that relies on human air traffic controllers infeasible. To enable UAVs to safely and...