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...
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...
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...
As robotic systems become increasingly prevalent in our lives (e.g., by harvesting food, assisting with disaster response and defense, and transporting persons and our goods around the world) there is a growing need to ensure that they can cooperate to achieve their intended goals. Robotic cooperation in the real-world is...
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...
Emerging applications for robotic data collection include ocean monitoring, emergency response and urban search and rescue. At the core of these applications is a robot's ability to make informed decisions on incomplete data. This dissertation addresses this problem by developing novel techniques for modeling and estimating structured environments using deep...
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...
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...
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,...