An Autonomous Surface Vehicle for Long Term Operations

Environmental monitoring of marine environments presents several challenges: the harshness of the environment, the often remote location, and most importantly, the vast area it covers. Manual operations are time consuming, often dangerous, and labor intensive. Operations from oceanographic vessels are costly and limited to open seas and generally deeper bodies of water. In addition, with lake, river, and ocean shoreline being a finite resource, waterfront property presents an ever increasing valued commodity, requiring exploration and continued monitoring of remote waterways. In order to efficiently explore and monitor currently known marine environments as well as reach and explore remote areas of interest, we present a design of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) with the power to cover large areas, the payload capacity to carry sufficient power and sensor equipment, and enough fuel to remain on task for extended periods. An analysis of the design and a discussion on lessons learned during deployments is presented in this paper.Comment: In proceedings of MTS/IEEE OCEANS, 2018, Charlesto

A method for modeling contact dynamics for automated capture mechanisms

Logicon Control Dynamics develops contact dynamics models for space-based docking and berthing vehicles. The models compute contact forces for the physical contact between mating capture mechanism surfaces. Realistic simulation requires proportionality constants, for calculating contact forces, to approximate surface stiffness of contacting bodies. Proportionality for rigid metallic bodies becomes quite large. Small penetrations of surface boundaries can produce large contact forces

Plasduino: an inexpensive, general purpose data acquisition framework for educational experiments

Based on the Arduino development platform, Plasduino is an open-source data acquisition framework specifically designed for educational physics experiments. The source code, schematics and documentation are in the public domain under a GPL license and the system, streamlined for low cost and ease of use, can be replicated on the scale of a typical didactic lab with minimal effort. We describe the basic architecture of the system and illustrate its potential with some real-life examples.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, presented at the XCIX conference of the Societ\`a Italiana di Fisic

Proposed IFR Air Ambulance Coverage for Middle and East Tennessee

Rural areas do not receive the same emergency medical services as metropolitan and suburban areas due to their remote locations. In the event of a life-threatening medical emergency, citizens in rural areas cannot be transported to a level-one trauma center within the critical Golden Hour. The Golden Hour is the hour during which the mortality rate can be reduced by 50% if a patient can reach a trauma center. The inability of helicopter EMS operations to fly in poor weather lessens a patient’s chances for surviving a medical emergency. Helicopter air ambulance operations enable hospitals to provide comparable service to rural locations. Low cloud cover and reduced visibility often prevent or hamper air ambulance service to rural areas. This thesis attempts to determine how and where to locate non-precision GPS instrument approach procedures in Middle and East Tennessee so that the area could be served by instrument-certified EMS air ambulance operators during instrument meteorological conditions (IMC). The objective of the thesis is to systematically survey the Middle and East Tennessee area in order to identify proposed locations for GPS approaches to provide 95% EMS coverage. Appropriate maps and statistics are provided to document this survey. Alternatives on how to implement EMS instrument approaches are: (1) Allow continued haphazard commercial development. (2) Wait on the FAA to develop the infrastructure. (3) Press for early development of a publicly-funded integrated system of instrument approaches. iv The author recommends the development of a publicly funded, integrated system of instrument approaches as an experimental test project in the Middle and East Tennessee area and provides a roadmap for the steps required to implement this project. The concept of an integrated system of publicly funded instrument approach procedures is expounded. This system involves instrument approach procedures (IAPs) either based on a particular hospital helipad or on an existing airport approach which is within three nautical miles of a medical center. Such a system would involve the development of 33 instrument approach procedures located at the approximate locations specified in Figure 2.4 page 43. Additional emerging free-flight technology could, and should, be included in this proposed instrument approach system