Category: News

Dr. Haleh Aghajani, UTARI Research Scientist, in collaboration with UTA researchers has been awarded the Interdisciplinary Research Program (IRP) Grant. The IRP grant will help fund “From data to personalized preventive medicine: leveraging wearable sensors to promote active living in women of color with obesity” research project. Using combined methodologies of behavioral science, health communication, and data science, the researchers will conduct a mixed-methods study to development personalized feedback messaging system based on data from consumer-facing wearables, such as Fitbit, for women of color with obesity who are at risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.

Investigators:

AIS researchers won the Best Poster Paper at The 14th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) Conference held June 29-July 2, 2021. Accolades for MINA: A Multitasking Intelligent Nurse Aid Robot were received by researchers Harish Ram Nambiappan, Kodur Krishna Chaitanya, Maria Kyrarini, Nicholas Gans, and Fillia Makedon.

Also, researchers were named one of three finalists at the upcoming IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, to be held August 22-27, 2021. Probabilistic Movement Primitive Control via Control Barrier Functions’ team consists of Mohammadreza Davoodi, Asif Iqbal, Joseph M. Cloud, William J. Beksi, and Nicholas R. Gans.

The ASME 2021 Virtual International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference will be held from August 17th to August 20th.

Three papers by UTARI research scientists will be presented.

• Reduction of Whole Body Vibration In a Wide Frequency Range Using Inflation Pressure Control Of Air Bladder Cushion
• Corrugated Diaphragm Actuator For Soft Robotic and Exoskeleton Applications
• Development and Characterization of a Modular Soft Actuator Enabled Elbow Exoskeleton for Assistive Movements

This year’s Fully Virtual event, IDETC/CIE 2021, will highlight emergent technologies that impact the critical engineering issues of product design and development, manufacturing, and the management and integration of information systems throughout the product life-cycle. These events are key international meetings for design and manufacturing engineers in academia, government and industry.

Three winners were selected at the CPS-IoT Week 2021 Student Design Competition: Networked Computing on the Edge on May 18th, 2021.

The winners were:

• First place winners are Sanket Lokhande, Ian Lau, and Hao Xu, University of Nevado, Reno, for their design project “Intelligent Multi-User Millimeter-Wave MIMO Systems with Multiple Edge Computing Relays.”
• Second place recipients are Reese Grimsley, Eve Hu, Bob Iannucci, Carnegie Mellon University, Edward Andert, Arizona State University, and Ian McCormack, University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire for their design project “One Program to Rule the Intersection.”
• Third place went to Xiyuan Zhu, Andrew Charway, and Rosa Zheng, Lehigh University, for their design project “Video Transmission through Underwater Acoustic Channels.”

Organized by Dr. Yan Wan, Professor, Electrical Engineering, of the University of Texas at Arlington, and Dr. Junfei Xie, Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering, San Diego State University, the competition invites student teams of all levels to develop and demonstrate innovative projects on the topic of networked computing for edge applications. Projects of integrated computing, control, and communication components on the ground, underwater, or air mobile platforms are welcomed.

Funded by an NSF CRI project grant, and sponsored by Nvidia Corporation, the competition included 15 university participants. Other sponsors included the University of Texas at Arlington, San Diego State University, and the AIAA Intelligent Systems Technical Committee.

For more information, please visit the competition website at https://smile-sdsu.github.io/cps_iot/.

Stephanie Arevalo Arboleda, a research scientist at the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences and a PhD student at the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany, joins the AIS division as a visiting scholar.  She will also be the speaker at UTARI’s July 30th seminar. Her topic will be “Towards A Design for Human-Robot Collaboration at the Workplace by Enhancing The Visual Space.”

IPPM’s latest published journal papers present data on a characterization methodology for composites under fatigue loading using dielectric state variables and a review of artificial intelligence models from the past few decades that have been applied to structural health monitoring and prognostics health management of polymer matrix composites.

• Stiffness Degradation in Fatigue Life of Composites Using Dielectric State Variables (Composite Structures, Vol. 273, October 1, 2021, link here)
• Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time Diagnostics and Prognostics of Composite Materials and its Uncertainties—A Review (Smart Materials and Structures, Vol. 30, No. 8, June 23, 2021, link here)

In addition, a patent was granted in April for IPPM’s “Systems And Methods For Assessing The Quality Of Adhesive Bonds.” More information can be found here.

Xochitl Villalpando, Administrative Services Officer, and Evenita Crim, Administrative Assistant I, have been awarded the UTA Staff Advisory Council Star Award. The award recognizes outstanding staff members who show a commitment and passion to the university.

The Staff Advisory Council (SAC) is an elected group of staff members across UTA who serve as representatives of the staff to the University administration. It mission is to serve as a representative body that strives to improve University operations, develop a sense of community, and enhance the work environment for the staff at UTA.

Dr. Yan Wan, Professor, Electrical Engineering, as Principal Investigator(PI) and co-PI, received three grants last year to develop fundamental intelligent control, cyber-physical systems, and optimization theories and to pursue their new applications in microgrids, multi-robot systems, and autonomous driving.

ONR

In this project, Wan will explore new analysis and design methods that have recently emerged in control theory for application in naval microgrid control systems that serve high-power pulsed missions with stringent time and performance guarantees. In particular, varying demands needs to be addressed within limited shipboard communication, computing, and energy resources. “Many new developments in control theory, such as those at the intersection of control, communication, and computing have not been taken advantage of to address the performance requirement of microgrids.” Wan and his collaborators from Stony Brook University and University of Virginia are developing new solutions, such as event-triggered distributed grid control solutions, for the robust operation of the grids to minimize manned operations. This project is funded under a new $7.36 million ONR program on University-Navy Research Collaboration on Energy Resiliency.

Toyota

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication is critical to autonomous driving. In order to keep the safety of people from traffic hazards as well as natural disasters, sensor data are desired to be shared among vehicles in real time. To facilitate the high speed data transmission for vehicle-to-vehicle communication, millimeter wave (mmWave) is a promising solution. Wan received a grant from Toyota Motor North America InfoTech Labs to develop scheduling solutions of mmWave directional communication links. The solution is expected to maximize network throughput with performance guarantees on the delay. “With the close collaboration with Toyota researchers, we are working toward establishing V2V mmWave channel scheduling standards that can be widely adopted.”

ARO

Wan also received a ARO grant with colleagues Frank Lewis and Ali Davoudi. The project develops a formal mathematical framework that allow autonomous multi-agent systems to operate in complex dynamic networked environments with diverse threats generated by malicious attacks, functional failures, and human errors. The proposed solution features graphical games and reinforcement learning, which equip the agents with the intelligence to interact with other agents and the change of environment. “Our work will make robots more intelligent,” Wan said. “They can improve their decisions through interactions with their peers and the environments in which they are operating.”

Dr. Nick Gans, Principal Research Scientist and AIS Division Head, and his team have have partnered with Novateur Research Solutions on two government funded projects through U.S. Army sponsored Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

The first project focuses on a neural-network driven dead reckoning navigation system that would allow soldiers to track their locations in GPS-denied environments.  The second focuses on a stereo line-scan imaging system to monitor road surface conditions under heave vehicle loads. UTARI continues to work with small businesses and industry to deliver solutions to real-world problems.

Dr. Blesson Isaac, along with Dr. Robert Taylor, and Dr. Kenneth Reifsnider has had their article “Anisotropic Characterizations of Electrospun PAN Nanofiber Mats Using Design of Experiments,” published in the Nanomaterials journal.

Read here…