Optimizing Distribution Sensor Placement for Border Patrol Interdiction using Microsoft Excel

The purpose of this research was to develop an electronic sensor placement model for border security. A model was developed using Microsoft Excel, with some add-on capabilities, to optimize the placement of electronic sensors on a border network given a pre-determined budgetary constraint. The model is capable of handling multiple sensor types, which are placed together as packages, and allows for daytime, nighttime, or 24 hour operation of each sensor type. Additionally, each sensor can be assigned a specific range and detection probability curve within the given range. The model is capable of optimizing either average coverage, or minimum coverage, across the nodes of a network by selecting the nodes where sensor packages are to be placed. Due to its simplicity and ability to run in Microsoft Excel, it is believed that the model developed in this research can also be used in a number of military applications where border security is necessary

Evaluating Storm Sewer Pipe Condition Using Autonomous Drone Technology

The United States Air Force (USAF) owns a total of 30.9 million linear feet (LF) of storm sewer pipes valued at approximately $2.3B in its vast portfolio of built infrastructure. Current inventory records reveal that 78% of the inventory (24.1 million LF) is over 50 years old and will soon exceed its estimated service life. Additionally, the USAF depends on contract support while its business processes undervalue in-service evaluations from long-term funding plans. Ultimately, this disconnect negatively impacts infrastructure performance and overall strategic success, and the USAF risks making uninformed decisions in a fiscally constrained environment. This research presents a proof of concept effort to automate storm sewer evaluations for the USAF using unmanned ground vehicles and computer vision technology for autonomous defect detection. The results conceptually show that a low-cost autonomous system can be developed using commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software to quantify the condition of underground storm sewer pipes with an efficiency of 36%. While the results show that the prototype developed for this research is not sufficient for operational use, it does demonstrate that the USAF can leverage COTS systems in future AM strategies to improve asset visibility at a significantly lower cost.

Interactive Planning and Sensing for Aircraft in Uncertain Environments with Spatiotemporally Evolving Threats

Autonomous aerial, terrestrial, and marine vehicles provide a platform for several applications including cargo transport, information gathering, surveillance, reconnaissance, and search-and-rescue. To enable such applications, two main technical problems are commonly addressed.On the one hand, the motion-planning problem addresses optimal motion to a destination: an application example is the delivery of a package in the shortest time with least fuel. Solutions to this problem often assume that all relevant information about the environment is available, possibly with some uncertainty. On the other hand, the information gathering problem addresses the maximization of some metric of information about the environment: application examples include such as surveillance and environmental monitoring. Solutions to the motion-planning problem in vehicular autonomy assume that information about the environment is available from three sources: (1) the vehicle’s own onboard sensors, (2) stationary sensor installations (e.g. ground radar stations), and (3) other information gathering vehicles, i.e., mobile sensors, especially with the recent emphasis on collaborative teams of autonomous vehicles with heterogeneous capabilities. Each source typically processes the raw sensor data via estimation algorithms. These estimates are then available to a decision making system such as a motion- planning algorithm. The motion-planner may use some or all of the estimates provided. There is an underlying assumption of “separation� between the motion-planning algorithm and the information about environment. This separation is common in linear feedback control systems, where estimation algorithms are designed independent of control laws, and control laws are designed with the assumption that the estimated state is the true state. In the case of motion-planning, there is no reason to believe that such a separation between the motion-planning algorithm and the sources of estimated environment information will lead to optimal motion plans, even if the motion planner and the estimators are themselves optimal. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate whether the removal of this separation, via interactive motion-planning and sensing, can significantly improve the optimality of motion- planning. The major contribution of this work is interactive planning and sensing. We consider the problem of planning the path of a vehicle, which we refer to as the actor, to traverse a threat field with minimum threat exposure. The threat field is an unknown, time- variant, and strictly positive scalar field defined on a compact 2D spatial domain – the actor’s workspace. The threat field is estimated by a network of mobile sensors that can measure the threat field pointwise. All measurements are noisy. The objective is to determine a path for the actor to reach a desired goal with minimum risk, which is a measure sensitive not only to the threat exposure itself, but also to the uncertainty therein. A novelty of this problem setup is that the actor can communicate with the sensor network and request that the sensors position themselves in a procedure we call sensor reconfiguration such that the actor’s risk is minimized. This work continues with a foundation in motion planning in time-varying fields where waiting is a control input. Waiting is examined in the context of finding an optimal path with considerations for the cost of exposure to a threat field, the cost of movement, and the cost of waiting. For example, an application where waiting may be beneficial in motion-planning is the delivery of a package where adverse weather may pose a risk to the safety of a UAV and its cargo. In such scenarios, an optimal plan may include “waiting until the storm passes.� Results on computational efficiency and optimality of considering waiting in path- planning algorithms are presented. In addition, the relationship of waiting in a time- varying field represented with varying levels of resolution, or multiresolution is studied. Interactive planning and sensing is further developed for the case of time-varying environments. This proposed extension allows for the evaluation of different mission windows, finite sensor network reconfiguration durations, finite planning durations, and varying number of available sensors. Finally, the proposed method considers the effect of waiting in the path planner under the interactive planning and sensing for time-varying fields framework. Future work considers various extensions of the proposed interactive planning and sensing framework including: generalizing the environment using Gaussian processes, sensor reconfiguration costs, multiresolution implementations, nonlinear parameters, decentralized sensor networks and an application to aerial payload delivery by parafoil

Testing and evaluation of military systems in a high stakes environment

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-82).Testing is a critical element of systems engineering, as it allows engineers to ensure that products meet specifications before they go into production. The testing literature, however, has been largely theoretical, and is difficult to apply to real world decisions that testers and program managers face daily. Nowhere is this problem more present than for military systems, where testing is complicated by of a variety of factors like politics and the complexities of military operations. Because of the uniqueness of military systems, the consequences of failure can be very large and thus require special testing considerations, as program managers need to make absolutely sure that the system will not fail. In short, because of the high stakes consequences associated with the development and use of military systems, testers must adjust their testing strategies to ensure that high stakes consequences are adequately mitigated. The high consequence space is broken down into two types of consequences, programmatic and operational. Programmatic consequences occur while a system is under development, and result when insufficient testing is conducted on a system, leading a program manager to have inadequate certainty that the system works to specification. When the program comes under inevitable scrutiny, a lack of testing data makes the program difficult to defend and can thus result in program termination. To address programmatic consequences, testers must utilize a broad based and adaptive test plan that ensures adequate testing across all system attributes, as a failure in any attribute might lead to program termination. To connect programmatic consequences to the realities of system development, the developments of the Division Air Defense System (DIVAD) and the M- 1 Abrams main battle tank are examined in comparative perspective, using testing as an explanation for their dramatically different programmatic outcomes. The DIVAD's testing strategy was not adequate, and the program suffered termination because of public and Congressional criticism; the M- l's strategy, by contrast, was very rigorous, allowing the system to avoid programmatic consequences despite criticism. Operational consequences result from failures of specific attributes during military operations, after the system has already been fielded. Operational consequences are distinguished by their disproportionate impacts at operational and strategic levels of operations, and require targeted testing based on analysis of critical system attributes. The procedure for this analysis is established through use of two case studies. The first case examines a sensor network designed to stop SCUD launches in austere areas; the second case, designed to analyze one system across several missions, conducts an analysis of the potential operational consequences of failures in the Predator drone's system attributes. The following seeks to better define the consequences of system failure with the understanding that the military world is in many ways unique from the civilian world. Implicit in this thesis is a plea for program managers to think carefully before cutting testing time in order to reduce program costs and shorten schedules, because less testing means a higher likelihood of disastrous programmatic consequences and less insurance against operational consequences that can dramatically effect the lives of troops in the field.by Raphael Moyer.S.B

Autonomous Gossiping: A self-organizing epidemic algorithm for selective information dissemination in mobile ad-hoc networks

We introduce autonomous gossiping (A/G), a new genre epidemic algorithm for selective dissemination of information in contrast to previous usage of epidemic algorithms which flood the whole network. A/G is a paradigm which suits well in a mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET) environment because it does not require any infrastructure or middleware like multicast tree and (un)subscription maintenance for publish/subscribe, but uses ecological and economic principles in a self-organizing manner in order to achieve its selectivity. The trade-off of using an infrastructure-less self-organizing mechanism like A/G is that it does not guarantee completeness deterministically as is one of the original objectives of alternate selective dissemination schemes like publish/subscribe. We argue that such incompleteness is not a problem in many non-critical real-life civilian application scenarios and realistic node mobility patterns, where the overhead of infrastructure maintenance may outweigh the benefits of completeness, more over, at present there exists no mechanism to realize publish/subscribe or other paradigms for selective dissemination in MANET environments. A/G's reliance and hence vulnerability on cooperation of mobile nodes is also much less as compared to other possible schemes using routing information, since it does not expect node philanthropy for forwarding/carrying information, but only cooperation to the extent that nodes already carrying the information pass it on to other suitable ones. Thus autonomous gossiping is expected to be a light-weight infrastructure-less information dissemination service for MANETs, and hence support any-to-many communication (flexible casting) without the need to establish and maintain separate routing information (e.g., multicast trees)

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities

Examines the state of the foundation's efforts to improve educational opportunities worldwide through universal access to and use of high-quality academic content

Innovation, technology and security: the emergence of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles before and after 9/11

This thesis addresses the relationship between military technological innovation and evolving practices of security before and after 9/11 through the case of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology and particularly the UAV lineage associated with the General Atomics Predator system. Through the case of UAV development the thesis contributes to wider theoretical debates regarding military innovation and weapons acquisition processes. The case illustrates that rather than a moment, innovation is better understood as a process. Rather than linear, however, the process is uncertain, involving complex interactions between institutional pressures, technological development and external events. The thesis presents UAV development in terms of ‘statuses’ of marginality, emergence and assimilation. Establishing the long UAV development history in the US, the thesis explores military innovation theory to consider the reasons for their long Cold War marginality, despite repeated efforts. It then considers the emergence of UAVs in the early post-Cold war period, focusing particularly on the design iterations that yielded the Predator and the bureaucratic political processes through which that system was fielded. Thirdly, the progressive assimilation of Predator is addressed in relation to the growing threat of terrorist networks, and the post-9/11 attempt to reorient existing military and intelligence capabilities to counter terrorism and counter insurgency operations. This raises the question of the relation between technological innovation and the security ‘pathways’ opened up after 9/11, the extent that 9/11 provided a window of opportunity for drone assimilation, and the role of drones in shaping the emergence of a technologically-enabled, remote approach to counter terrorism and military intervention

Third International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space 1994

The Third International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation for Space (i-SAIRAS 94), held October 18-20, 1994, in Pasadena, California, was jointly sponsored by NASA, ESA, and Japan's National Space Development Agency, and was hosted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology. i-SAIRAS 94 featured presentations covering a variety of technical and programmatic topics, ranging from underlying basic technology to specific applications of artificial intelligence and robotics to space missions. i-SAIRAS 94 featured a special workshop on planning and scheduling and provided scientists, engineers, and managers with the opportunity to exchange theoretical ideas, practical results, and program plans in such areas as space mission control, space vehicle processing, data analysis, autonomous spacecraft, space robots and rovers, satellite servicing, and intelligent instruments

Geometric Accuracy Testing, Evaluation and Applicability of Space Imagery to the Small Scale Topographic Mapping of the Sudan

The geometric accuracy, interpretabilty and the applicability of using space imagery for the production of small-scale topographic maps of the Sudan have been assessed. Two test areas have been selected. The first test area was selected in the central Sudan including the area between the Blue Nile and the White Nile and extending to Atbara in the Nile Province. The second test area was selected in the Red Sea Hills area which has modern 1:100,000 scale topographic map coverage and has been covered by six types of images, Landsat MSS TM and RBV; MOMS; Metric Camera (MC); and Large format Camera (LFC). Geometric accuracy testing has been carried out using a test field of well-defined control points whose terrain coordinates have been obtained from the existing maps. The same points were measured on each of the images in a Zeiss Jena Stereocomparator (Stecometer C II) and transformed into the terrain coordinate system using polynomial transformations in the case of the scanner and RBV images; and space resection/intersection, relative/absolute orientation and bundle adjustment in the case of the MC and LFC photographs. The two sets of coordinates were then compared. The planimetric accuracies (root mean square errors) obtained for the scanner and RBV images were: Landsat MSS +/-80 m; TM +/-45 m; REV +/-40 m; and MOMS +/-28 m. The accuracies of the 3-dimensional coordinates obtained from the photographs were: MC:-X=+/-16 m, Y=+/-16 m, Z=+/-30 m; and LFC:- X=+/-14 m, Y=+/-14 m, and Z=+/-20 m. The planimetric accuracy figures are compatible with the specifications for topographic maps at scales of 1:250,000 in the case of MSS; 1:125,000 scale in the case of TM and RBV; and 1:100,000 scale in the case of MOMS. The planimetric accuracies (vector =+/-20 m) achieved with the two space cameras are compatible with topographic mapping at 1:60,000 to 1:70,000 scale. However, the spot height accuracies of +/-20 to +/-30 m - equivalent to a contour interval of 50 to 60 m - fall short of the required heighting accuracies for 1:60,000 to 1:100,000 scale mapping. The interpretation tests carried out on the MSS, TM, and RBV images showed that, while the main terrain features (hills, ridges, wadis, etc.) can be mapped reasonably well, there was an almost complete failure to pick up the cultural features - towns, villages, roads, railways, etc. - present in the test areas. The high resolution MOMS images and the space photographs were much more satisfactory in this respect though still the cultural features are difficult to pick up due to the buildings and roads being built out of local material and exhibiting little contrast on the images