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...
This dissertation incorporates coalition formation and probabilistic planning towards a domain-independent automated planning solution scalable to multiple heterogeneous robots in complex domains. The first research direction investigates the effectiveness of Task Fusion and introduces heuristics that improve task allocation and result in better quality plans, while requiring lower computational cost...
Human-robot teams involve humans and robots collaborating to achieve tasks under various environmental conditions. Successful teaming requires robots to adapt autonomously in real-time to a human teammate's state. An important element of such adaptation is the ability for the robot to infer the tasks performed by their human teammates. Human-robot...
Disaster response and surveillance operations will increasingly incorporate Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)s due to their cost-effectiveness and maneuverability. This trend has driven the research on small-sized quadcopters for varying indoor applications. Small-sized quadcopters' payload and computational capacity limit the usage of complex vision-based collision avoidance algorithms that are employed by...
Demanding task environments (e.g., supervising a remotely piloted aircraft) require performing tasks quickly and accurately; however, periods of low and high operator workload can decrease task performance. Intelligent modulation of the system’s demands and interaction modality in response to changes in operator workload state may increase performance by avoiding undesirable...
This work explores the hypothesis that proton irradiation is a feasible alternative to simulate accelerated thermal aging for Ni2Cr long-range ordered phase formation within NiCr and NiCrFe alloys. In this study, various model alloys and commercial alloys 690 and 690+P (0.01 wt.% P) were subject to 2 MeV proton irradiation...
This dissertation works towards determining the mechanisms driving the Mo isotopic composition of soils, and how these signals may be used to refine the use of Mo as a proxy of biogeochemical processes. The first step towards quantifying Mo fractionation in soils is to determine the mechanisms controlling Mo accumulation,...
Molten salts have been targeted as a promising coolant for next generation reactors due to their high boiling point, heat capacity, and thermal conductivity. Despite these benefits, molten salt systems present unique materials compatibility issues, highlighted by the aggressive corrosion attack and dealloying typically seen on materials in these environments....
Cephalopod-inspired soft robot arms have been studied as a new type of manipulator. These arms have been proposed for reach and grab tasks, underwater locomotion via swimming and walking, and robotic surgery. However, the capabilities of existing soft arms are limited to simple motions and light loads. Arm design has...