Title of dissertation: OBSERVABILITY-BASED SAMPLING AND ESTIMATION OF FLOWFIELDS USING MULTI-SENSOR SYSTEMS Levi D. DeVries, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor Derek A. Paley Department of Aerospace Engineering The long-term goal of this research is to optimize estimation of an unknown flowfield using an autonomous multi-vehicle or multi-sensor system. The specific r...

Advanced Vehicle Control Systems (AVCS) is a key technology for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and Intelligent Vehicle Control System (IVCS). AVCS involves automatic steering, acceleration and braking control of fully autonomous vehicles. The unmanned control of the steering wheel is one of the most important challenges faced by the researchers. This paper proposes control architecture...

Using vehicle trajectory datasets developed over a study section for three traffic flow levels, rectangular hyperbolic relation between time-to-collision and relative speeds in vehicle-following behavior were observed. A new methodology estimating the probable rear-end collisions given stream is based on this relation. The examined terms of hysteresis phenomenon concerning distance gap (DG) spe...

In recent years, quadrotor helicopters have become a popular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform, and their control has been undertaken by many researchers (Dierks & Jagannathan, 2008). However, a team of UAV’s working together is often more effective than a single UAV in scenarios like surveillance, search and rescue, and perimeter security. Therefore, the formation control of UAV’s has bee...

The literatures on both authentic leadership and behavioral integrity have argued that leader integrity drives follower performance. Yet, despite overlap in conceptualization and mechanisms, no research has investigated how authentic leadership and behavioral integrity relate to one another in driving follower performance. In this study, we propose and test the notion that authentic leadership ...

Patterns of event propagation in online social networks provide novel insights on the modeling and analysis of information dissemination over networks and physical systems. This paper studies the importance of follower links for event propagation on Twitter. Three recent event propagation traces are collected with the user languages being used to identify the Network of Networks (NoN) structure...

Researchers have reported on the importance of the rib cage in maintaining mechanical stability in the thoracic spine and on the validity of a compressive follower preload. However, dynamic mechanical testing using both the rib cage and follower load has never been studied. An in vitro biomechanical study of human cadaveric thoracic specimens with rib cage intact in lateral bending, flexion/ext...

Achieving speed, safety and energy optimization in vehicle platoons is among the important topics of recent years. In this context, work focuses on improving string stability (SS) heterogeneous platoons. Better SS allows for smaller gap between vehicles, which means shorter time headway Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) or inter-vehicle following-distance platooning. Shorter distance r...

1. Abstract A 2-dimensional lumbar spine is modeled with 64 back muscles and the static behavior of the model is predicted using an optimization technique. The goal of this study was to investigate if a follower load can be produced by the back muscles for enhancing the mechanical stability of the lumbar spine in a quiet standing posture. Recent studies demonstrated that the stability of the lu...