The principle purpose of this research is to investigate and determine methods and approaches that can translate to a usable digital twin model of an aircraft. The PI will collaborate with NASA LaRC researchers and engineers directly.

In terms of the NASA educational mission, this program supports STEM through a highly structured, hands-on experience. Students in such areas as zoology will be using UAV in their field to monitor wildlife; more broadly this is a sought after skill in many of the animal science related areas of specialty. The same can be said for engineering students in the different areas of engineering. In fact, with the spread of UAV throughout our industries, this skill being received is expected to be useful in nearly all of the employment areas, state, federal, and private. Of course, the excitement of the program is also a bonus and this will be encouraging to all of the participating students in their respective STEM fields of study.

The proposed work is essentially a bridge effort. The goal is to advance the work that was performed in the previous instructional grant, in preparation for an NSF grant that will broaden the impact of our work. The primary objective is to develop a design tool that can be used with each of the five CAD apps and support further instructional software testing and assessment. Currently, when using any one of the apps, the user selects nodes, connects them to create a structure, applies boundary conditions, then applies loads, and finally runs the program after which results are displayed in different forms (movies, static drawings, tabular������������������data, pop���������������ups, etc). The user essentially runs one case.���������

The objective of Project Angelfish is to develop a dual-purpose (air and water) unmanned system, referred to as Angelfish. The system to be developed will be capable of locomotion and controlled maneuvering in both the aerial and subsurface domains. The air-purpose performance (flight distance, duration, etc.) is to be minimally compromised by the water-purpose requirements, and the transition between air and water are to be as reliable as possible, again with minimal performance penalty (power). The goal of the effort is to develop alternative designs that lie throughout the trade space and to focus the further development on the most promising design or set of designs.

US Army Special Operations Forces (SOF) seek autonomous and semi-autonomous tactical robotic systems that can provide mission support including counter-IED support, improved situational awareness, route clearance, patrol support, target engagement, logistics and communications support. At present, such systems are too large, slow, costly or noisy to support most SOF mission needs, and they still require a considerable level of human control, limiting their added benefit in an operational environment. Small unmanned systems are desirable for mission support but improvements are needed in areas such as perception, sensing, obstacle avoidance, autonomous decision-making, mechanical systems, action/motion planning and intelligent behavior in order to permit tactical operations effectiveness. This task will focus on Army-specific challenges related to developing autonomous capabilities for air systems. These efforts correspond with ARO core thrusts in Intelligent Networks (10.3) and Multi-Agent Network Control (10.4). The core areas of focus will be related to enabling capabilities that will reduce the soldier’s workload and increase mobility, maneuverability and information dominance.

This grant aims to close the gap in the ?design thread? found in AE and ME undergraduate programs by developing general-purpose, course-specific CAD apps for its core courses in the freshman and sophomore years ? Engineering Statics, Engineering Dynamics, Solid Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, and Vibrations.

The objective of this proposal is to build upon advances in engineering education and engineering design research as a means of introducing design into the early phases of the aerospace engineering curriculum at NC State. This research builds on the PI's design background and the Co-PI's initial efforts at developing a repository of computational "modules" used by students for in-class activities and for knowledge acquisition outside of the classroom. Freeware modules will be created that, when used together, build a student's appreciation for the multidisciplinary aspect of engineering, creates a hands-on design experience, and fosters system-level analysis. When used separately, these modules will provide curriculum-wide teaching tools for component-level content while supporting a student's independent inquiry. Simultaneously, this proposal will strengthen the curriculum's existing design thread by introducing a virtual, multidisciplinary rocket design problem. Motivation for this research lies within the ever increasing challenge of improving engineering education to facilitate a student's capability to solve complex problems that require multidisciplinary approaches and systems thinking. This task is particularly important today, as the same technological advancements that have driven societal improvements have led to tightly coupled engineered systems that exhibit complex component interactions. Assessing and working within the confines of these interactions will be fundamentally important for the next generation of engineers who will face challenges in energy, environmental management, food and water shortages, housing, health, and transportation. While current curricula often encourage and provide an analytical approach to problem solving, capabilities related to system design, integration, and synthesis are what industry now requires of graduating engineers. Recent graduates are also discovering that technical skills can more quickly become obsolete as markets become more international. To maximize the competitiveness of US engineering students, the National Science Board identifies that the context of engineering education must change to ensure students more directly meet today's industrial needs. Adopting a systematic process provides the necessary, regimented guidance that students need when gaining experience with engineering design. However, this is not a "silver bullet" solution. Students in the early phases of their engineering education are novices who have core competencies in science and math. From a design perspective, this competency obtained from their theoretical courses allows them to solve highly structured, and highly constrained, problems involving formal concepts. To become proficient and fluent in engineering design, engineering education research has shown that students must build an ability to solve less structured, more uncertain kinds of problems. We propose that software, specifically in the form of computational "modules", provides an effective approach to facilitate a student's transition from competency to proficiency in engineering design.

The primary focus of this project is to streamline pathways through which students receive an education that equips them with the computing tools necessary for them to serve as future computing leaders of society. Ultimately, the proposed activities are designed to make the computing education more relevant to the ever-changing needs of the computing workforce in the United States. To achieve these objectives, the institution proposes assembling a community of individuals, each of whom is invested in their own unique way to revitalizing the undergraduate computing education. The community will involve faculty representatives from several academic departments, faculty from CISE disciplines, and delegates from industry partner organizations. Faculty learning communities are nothing new to academe. The goal of the efforts proposed here is to put a new twist on a proven faculty collaboration method. To date, many learning communities have been limited to faculty involvement only, and involvement from engineering faculty in these formal university-wide communities has been somewhat disappointing. Although, these university communities can be an effective means of addressing many issues pertinent to education, the proposed activities seek to encourage a variety of key computing stakeholders outside of the university to participate. The community created would partner with local industry leaders to open up meaningful channels for dialogue to flow from industry to the university. The community seeks to view industry partners as customers so that university educators can perform a needs-assessment by which the computing skills relevant to today's computing professionals are determined. Faculty can then translate these needs into their respective curricula in order to create a diverse, flexible education that will result in a diverse, flexible workforce of computing professionals.

This effort builds on Dan Edwards' studies and ongoing efforts that he is undertaking to lay a foundation in autonomous soaring. In this effort, Dan is perfecting a generalizing soaring algorithm, making it more robust with respect to the irregularity of the velocity distributions that are typically found in thermals. The algorithm relaxes the simple shape of the algorithm, allowing for elliptical cross-sections, variation in time, and general three-dimensionality. The results will be documented in a journal article that will be submitted to the AIAA Journal of Aircraft during the period of this grant.

The goal of the proposed work is to develop a method to synthesize, in real-time, unsteady resultant forces and moments from measurements over the surface of a submarine hull. More specifically, the following questions will be addressed in the work: (1) Can we obtain the forces and moments experienced by a submarine in unsteady flow from sensors placed on the hull? (2) How does the correlation between force/moment and stagnation/separation point with 2-dimensional bodies, which has been demonstrated in the literature, extend to 3-dimesional bodies, which has not yet been investigated? (3) Can the technique of modal filters, which has had success in distributed sensing of structural vibrations, be used in the force/moment and stagnation point/separation point correlation? (4) Is there a simple relationship between the attainable resolution of forces/moments and the number of sensors used on the body? (5) If so, what is this relationship? (6) Will this method of sensing unsteady fluid forces and moments be useful in non-body of revolution submarine design and/or real-time submarine control?