Commercial and public safety usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the National Airspace is currently restricted by federal regulation. The Federal Aeronautics Association is interested in modifying the restrictions; however, research is needed to study the human factor and required aptitude for a single human operating multiple UAVs. This Master’s...
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...
The advent of supercritical CO2 as a new heat-exchange medium has seen strong interest from the power industry and the energy research field recently. It is advan- tageous in comparison with other heat-exchange cycles, as it can be operated safely at much higher temperatures and pressures, thus increasing the thermal...
Mountain search and rescue is a vital form of emergency response to assist people in austere environments (e.g., extreme terrain, poor weather). Volunteer mountain search and rescue teams in the United States have begun adopting consumer- grade unmanned aerial vehicles to assist a variety of tasks (e.g., search, resource delivery);...
Seasonal emergent wetlands in the Pacific Northwest have not been regarded traditionally as fish rearing habitat, despite access to such habitat when river flows overtop riverbanks and connect to the floodplain. As a result, restoration and enhancement projects to remediate for the loss of such wetland habitat are being implemented...
In this paper, we derive the fundamental solution to the heat equation with a discontinuous diffusion coefficient in the free space, with an absorbing boundary, and with a reflecting boundary. We use the fundamental solution with an absorbing boundary to make connections with the transition probability density of absorbed Skew...
In transboundary water resources policy and management situations, such as the governance of the Columbia River Basin, complex social, ecological, and economic factors seem to be in irreconcilable competition with one another. However, cooperative negotiation provides an outlet for entities and stakeholders to "expand the pie" and develop creative alternatives...