Development and Evaluation of Sensor Concepts for Ageless Aerospace Vehicles: Report 6 - Development and Demonstration of a Self-Organizing Diagnostic System for Structural Health Monitoring

This report describes a significant advance in the capability of the CSIRO/NASA structural health monitoring Concept Demonstrator (CD). The main thrust of the work has been the development of a mobile robotic agent, and the hardware and software modifications and developments required to enable the demonstrator to operate as a single, self-organizing, multi-agent system. This single-robot system is seen as the forerunner of a system in which larger numbers of small robots perform inspection and repair tasks cooperatively, by self-organization. While the goal of demonstrating self-organized damage diagnosis was not fully achieved in the time available, much of the work required for the final element that enables the robot to point the video camera and transmit an image has been completed. A demonstration video of the CD and robotic systems operating will be made and forwarded to NASA

Heath Monitoring of Thermal Protection Systems - Preliminary Measurements and Design Specifications

The work reported here is the first stage of a project that aims to develop a health monitoring system for Thermal Protection Systems (TPS) that enables a vehicle to safely re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. The TPS health monitoring system is to be integrated into an existing acoustic emissions-based Concept Demonstrator, developed by CSIRO, which has been previously demonstrated for evaluating impact damage of aerospace systems

Partitioning Method for Emergent Behavior Systems Modeled by Agent-Based Simulations

Used to describe some interesting and usually unanticipated pattern or behavior, the term emergence is often associated with time-evolutionary systems comprised of relatively large numbers of interacting yet simple entities. A significant amount of previous research has recognized the emergence phenomena in many real-world applications such as collaborative robotics, supply chain analysis, social science, economics and ecology. As improvements in computational technologies combined with new modeling paradigms allow the simulation of ever more dynamic and complex systems, the generation of data from simulations of these systems can provide data to explore the phenomena of emergence. To explore some of the modeling implications of systems where emergent phenomena tend to dominate, this research examines three simulations based on familiar natural systems where each is readily recognized as exhibiting emergent phenomena. To facilitate this exploration, a taxonomy of Emergent Behavior Systems (EBS) is developed and a modeling formalism consisting of an EBS lexicon and a formal specification for models of EBS is synthesized from the long history of theories and observations concerning emergence. This modeling formalism is applied to each of the systems and then each is simulated using an agent-based modeling framework. To develop quantifiable measures, associations are asserted: 1) between agent-based models of EBS and graph-theoretical methods, 2) with respect to the formation of relationships between entities comprising a system and 3) concerning the change in uncertainty of organization as the system evolves. These associations form the basis for three measurements related to the information flow, entity complexity, and spatial entropy of the simulated systems. These measurements are used to: 1) detect the existence of emergence and 2) differentiate amongst the three systems. The results suggest that the taxonomy and formal specification developed provide a workable, simulation-centric definition of emergent behavior systems consistent with both historical concepts concerning the emergence phenomena and modern ideas in complexity science. Furthermore, the results support a structured approach to modeling these systems using agent-based methods and offers quantitative measures useful for characterizing the emergence phenomena in the simulations