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Professor Atkins is motivated by the needs of the Aerospace application, and so are many students. As engineers we are looking to make the world a better place. For aviation, she pursues autonomy research to improve safety of flight and enable new missions. For space, she is interested in augmenting onboard decision systems and supporting closer astronaut-robot collaboration. Increasingly autonomous systems for any vehicle must be resilient to failures and must continue to make rational decisions in the presence of unexpected or anomalous events. These challenge problems require advances in sensing and decision-making. Cloud-based data sources can be fused with real-time sensor feedback to better inform decision systems.
Atkins overall research goal is to identify, adapt, and advance an appropriate set of models and algorithms from the control systems and computer science communities to best solve key Aerospace research challenges. Her PhD research revealed challenges and opportunities in defining the best representation or abstraction for decision-making, particularly when the set of features and values might be incomplete or incorrect. Many presume “state” is fully-defined by a vector of real numbers, yet human cognition is based on symbols that translate to objects, actions, and measures or attributes of each object or action. Dynamics and control system researchers have developed capable and mathematically-correct motion planning, guidance, navigation, and feedback control techniques. A central challenge in application-driven autonomy research is when and how to apply existing techniques versus defining a new abstraction or new algorithm that might be a more effective strategy.
Section “c” of Atkins’ CV describes her past, current, and proposed research projects. These projects span a variety of fundamental and application topics, but they all involve “systems” problems best solved with multidisciplinary models and methods. Atkins’ first project in emergency landing planning relied on an established geometric path construction method, the Dubins path, to connect an initial aircraft state with a landing runway given a no-thrust (gliding) failure case. Perhaps the most important contribution of this work was not in path construction but instead in landing site selection. The simple multi-objective cost function combining common-sense utility terms didn’t receive too much attention, yet every pilot informed of this approach has agreed that inclusion of the more “practical” utility terms beyond time and energy use is important (and novel). This initial research has led to a long series of “emergency flight planning” studies, many in collaboration with researchers who provide essential adaptive control and system identification capabilities underlying the landing site selection and emergency landing planning layer on which my work has focused. The more recent extension to flight safety assessment and management (FSAM) addresses a long-standing challenge of how automation and crew can monitor and serve as safety backups to each other. While neither the deterministic (timed automaton) nor stochastic (Markov Decision Process) modeling constructs is fundamentally novel, perhaps the most important research contributions of this work are in abstracting the state space to forms that efficiently capture the decision space and that can be explained and understood by human operators and air traffic controllers.
Atkins’ research in cyberphysical systems (CPS) has resulted in two important research contributions, discussed in the context of collaborations and supported students in her CV. Both the “co-regulation” and “co-optimization” concepts show promise for offering a new dimension in multidisciplinary optimization. As emerging small UAS, CubeSats, and a variety of other small robotic systems become prevalent in research and commercial applications, we will see an increasing number of cases where computing, communication, and physical sensing and actuation systems must negotiate resource sharing in real-time rather than assuming one subsystem (physical or cyber) dominates.
As increasingly autonomous systems are proposed, Atkins envisions a wealth of new opportunities to inform and exploit cloud-based data, real-time perceptions, and appropriate model abstractions to make optimal decisions for long-duration autonomy and for collaborative human-machine systems. Autonomy is great to study, but an autonomous system is useless unless it ultimately accomplishes a mission that we, the humans, want to accomplish. We must harness the power of increasingly autonomous systems to educate and improve quality of life for people worldwide, not fall into a trap where the next generation grows dependent on autonomous systems without gaining a new evolutionary advantage.
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JOURNAL OF AEROSPACE INFORMATION SYSTEMSno. 3 (2024): 234-248
AIAA SCITECH 2024 Forum (2024)
JOURNAL OF AIRCRAFTno. 4 (2023): 1-6
JOURNAL OF AIRCRAFTno. 5 (2023): 1712-1720
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Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Jessy Grizzle,Ella Atkins,Leia Stirling, Elliott Rouse,Mark Guzdial, Damen Provost, Kimberly Mann, Joanna Millunchick
CoRR (2023)
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2023 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION, ICRApp.5359-5365, (2023)
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