Autonomous Capabilities for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Conducting Radiological Response: Findings from a High-fidelity Discovery Experiment

This article presents a preliminary work domain theory and identifies autonomous vehicle, navigational, and mission capabilities and challenges for small unmanned aerial systems (SUASs) responding to a radiological disaster. Radiological events are representative of applications that involve flying at low altitudes and close proximities to structures. To more formally understand the guidance and control demands, the environment in which the SUAS has to function, and the expected missions, tasks, and strategies to respond to an incident, a discovery experiment was performed in 2013. The experiment placed a radiological source emitting at 10 times background radiation in the simulated collapse of a multistory hospital. Two SUASs, an AirRobot 100B and a Leptron Avenger, were inserted with subject matter experts into the response, providing high operational fidelity. The SUASs were expected by the responders to fly at altitudes between 0.3 and 30 m, and hover at 1.5 m from urban structures. The proximity to a building introduced a decrease in GPS satellite coverage, challenging existing vehicle autonomy. Five new navigational capabilities were identified: scan, obstacle avoidance, contour following, environment-aware return to home, andreturn to highest reading. Furthermore, the data-to-decision process could be improved with autonomous data digestion and visualization capabilities. This article is expected to contribute to a better understanding of autonomy in a SUAS, serve as a requirement document for advanced autonomy, and illustrate how discovery experimentation serves as a design tool for autonomous vehicles

Modeling Human-Robot Interaction in Three Dimensions

This dissertation answers the question: Can a small autonomous UAV change a person's movements by emulating animal behaviors? Human-robot interaction (HRI) has generally been limited to engagements with ground robots at human height or shorter, essentially working on the same two dimensional plane, but this ignores potential interactions where the robot may be above the human such as small un- manned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) for crowd control and evacuation or for underwater or space vehicles acting as assistants for divers or astronauts. The dissertation combines two approaches {behavioral robotics and HRI {to create a model of \Comfortable Distance" containing the information about human-human and human-ground robot interactions and extends it to three dimensions. Behavioral robotics guides the ex- amination and transfer of relevant behaviors from animals, most notably mammals, birds, and ying insects, into a computational model that can be programmed in simulation and on a sUAV. The validated model of proxemics in three dimensions makes a fundamental contribution to human-robot interaction. The results also have significant benefit to the public safety community, leading to more effective evacuation and crowd control, and possibly saving lives. Three findings from this experiment were important in regards to sUAVs for evacuation: i) expressions focusing on the person, rather than the area, are good for decreasing time (by 7.5 seconds, p <.0001) and preference (by 17.4 %, p <.0001), ii) personal defense behaviors are best for decreasing time of interaction (by about 4 seconds, p <.004), while site defense behaviors are best for increasing distance of interaction (by about .5 m, p <.003), and iii) Hediger's animal zones may be more applicable than Hall's human social zones when considering interactions with animal behaviors in sUAVs

The Impacts of Activism: Women's Social Movement Organizations and Parliamentary Representation

Women's movements - both domestic and international - have made enormous political gainsjust in the past century. Gender inequality persists, however, in institutionalized politics around the world. The proportion of women in national legislatures or parliaments serves as a useful indicator and basis for cross-national comparison of political, as well as social, (in)equality; numerous scholars have offered explanations for the relative lack of women's political representation in parliaments and for the global differences in that representation. This field, however, has not fully analyzed women's social movements as factor increasing women's legislative presence. Likewise, social movement theory, although it has often grappled with operationalizing movement outcomes, has not fully addressed outcomes that are both politicaland cultural, as is women's political representation. Using data from women's organizations that are registered with the United Nations, this paper employs OLS multiple regression to analyze the effect of women's social movement organizing on the percentage of women in parliament, using a sample of countries from around the world. Location in Scandinavia and national quota threshold are consistently significant factors, which supports previous research. Although organizations are not initially a strong explanatory factor for the proportion of women in politics, interactions between organizations and civil liberties, GDP, and the regions of sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe are significant variables. This study finds that the presence of women's organizations lessens and can even reverse the negative relationship between civil liberties and percent female legislators. GDP and women's political representation are positively related, but the presence of women's organizations increases the strength of the relationship, where even a small increase in GDP leads to substantial gains in women's political representation. Past research has found that countries in sub-Saharan Africa often have higher proportions of female legislators, and that finding is borne out here; women's organizations, however, actually moderate that relationship, such that African women's organizing is negatively associated with political representation. Finally, this paper finds that, although Eastern Europe is negatively associated with women's political representation, the presence of women's organizations attenuates that relationship

Impacts of Cattle Grazing as a Tool to Control \u3ci\u3ePhragmites australis\u3c/i\u3e in Wetlands on Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Carbon

Phragmites australis is a plant that is causing problems in wetlands by outcompeting native plants that provide food and shelter for millions of migratory birds. Currently, managers try to control Phragmites australis by spraying herbicide, burning, and mowing, but these methods are costly, time consuming, and have low levels of success. Adding grazing as a tool to control Phragmites australis provides a cheap and low labor alternative. However, there are many concerns regarding if grazing will cause nutrient loading in our wetlands that will decrease water quality and alter beneficial functions of wetlands. To better understand the effects of grazing in wetlands, we proposed a two-year study and received funding from many organizations including the Utah Department of Fire, Forestry, and State Lands, South Davis Sewer District, and the Utah Department of Environmental Quality and Water Quality. Also, the Utah Department of Natural Resources helped tremendously in allowing access to the sites, in the actual implementation of the project, coordinating with local ranchers who allowed for their cattle to be in the study, managed their cattle during the study, and assisted with fence installation, and many volunteers from Utah dedicated hunters helped with the fence installation. We collected water, manure, soil, and leaf samples over time to analyze nutrient changes and measured changes in the plants, water levels, soil cover, and litter cover over time. We then compiled and analyzed this information to better understand how grazing impacts our wetlands. As a result, we were able to make some recommendations for future research and how best to graze in wetlands with minimal impacts according to the information we found

Aerial Flight Paths for Communication

This article presents an understanding of naive users’ perception of the communicative nature of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) motions refined through an iterative series of studies. This includes both what people believe the UAV is trying to communicate, and how they expect to respond through physical action or emotional response. Previous work in this area prioritized gestures from participants to the vehicle or augmenting the vehicle with additional communication modalities, rather than communicating without clear definitions of the states attempting to be conveyed. In an attempt to elicit more concrete states and better understand specific motion perception, this work includes multiple iterations of state creation, flight path refinement, and label assignment. The lessons learned in this work will be applicable broadly to those interested in defining flight paths, and within the human-robot interaction community as a whole, as it provides a base for those seeking to communicate using non-anthropomorphic robots. We found that the Negative Attitudes towards Robots Scale (NARS) can be an indicator of how a person is likely to react to a UAV, the emotional content they are likely to perceive from a message being conveyed, and it is an indicator for the personality characteristics they are likely to project upon the UAV. We also see that people commonly associate motions from other non-verbal communication situations onto UAVs. Flight specific recommendations are to use a dynamic retreating motion from a person to encourage following, use a perpendicular motion to their field of view for blocking, simple descending motion for landing, and to use either no motion or large altitude changes to encourage watching. Overall, this research explores the communication from the UAV to the bystander through its motion, to see how people respond physically and emotionally

Navigating Sex in College: A qualitative exploration of college students’ views on hookup culture and sexual assault

Thesis advisor: Paul GrayThe prevalence of sexual assaults on college campuses has been gaining more attention in recent years. Through 16 undergraduate interviews with both male and female students, college students’ attitudes about hookup culture, the role of sexual consent, and issues that they see surrounding college campus sexual assault were explored. Students felt as though they were not responsible for their own decisions; failed to empathize with, and often objectified, fellow students; expressed a problematic distinction between sexual assault and rape; and voiced a pressure to act in accordance with traditional gender norms. There needs to be a shift in the way college students are introduced to college including frank conversation among students about the impact their actions can have on their peers and themselves.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2016.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Departmental Honors.Discipline: Sociology

A Drone by Any Other Name: Purposes, End-User Trustworthiness, and Framing, but not Terminology, Affect Public Support for Drones

Projections indicate that, as an industry, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, commonly known as drones) could bring more than 100 000 jobs and $80 billion in economic growth to the U.S. by 2025 [1]. However, these promising projections do not account for how various publics may perceive such technologies. Understanding public perceptions is important because the attitudes of different groups can have large effects on the trajectory of a technology, strongly facilitating or hindering technology acceptance and uptake [2]. To advance understanding of U.S. public perceptions of UAV technologies, we conducted a nationwide survey of a convenience sample of 877 Americans recruited from Amazon’s pool of Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers. In our surveys, we used short scenarios to experimentally vary UAV characteristics, the end-users of the technology, and certain communication factors (terminology and framing). This allowed us to investigate the impacts of these factors alone and in combination. In addition, given the conflicts that sometimes arise around scientific findings and technologies (e.g., climate change, vaccines, [3], [4]), we also gave explicit attention to whether and how public support for UAVs varied by self-reported political ideology, issue attitudes, and perceptions of end-user trustworthiness. Finally, because UAVs for civilian purposes represented relatively new technologies at the time of the first survey, we examined whether public opinion is changing over time, as more people become aware of UAVs. We thus administered the same survey twice, separated by one year, in the fall of 2014 and 2015. The results of our experimental manipulations revealed a surprising lack of impact of terminology and UAV autonomy, a small impact of message framing and UAV end-user, and a relatively large impact of UAV purpose. We did not find that public attitudes changed much over the year between samples, and perceptions of end-user trustworthiness were strong predictors of public support. Still, our regression models only accounted for about 40% of the variance in public support, suggesting that additional variables should be studied in future work to gain a more complete understanding of public support for UAVs. We also found evidence of a small amount of political polarization of public opinion related to who was using the UAVs for what purpose, and this polarization appeared to be changing over time. Taken together, our results — which may be especially useful to UAV designers, marketers, and policy makers — suggest there is a need to establish that the UAVs are used for valued purposes and by users that publics find to be trustworthy. However, public judgments might be significantly impacted by personal or local ideologies rather than national priorities. In the next section, we describe in more detail prior research on public support for UAVs, and how we formulated our research questions and hypotheses. We then describe our methods, results, and findings in greater detail

Microsatellite Markers for the Study of Mixed Mating in Hibiscus Aponeurus and H. Flavifolilus from Kenya

In a mixed mating system, plants use both self- and cross-pollination to produce seeds. Observations of pollinator behavior from populations of two Kenyan Hibiscus species suggest that H. aponeurus uses self-pollination at higher rates than does the co-occurring H. flavifolius. To begin testing this hypothesis, we sought to develop a suite of variable genetic loci to use in measuring levels of selfing and outcrossing in natural populations. We tested five microsatellite primer pairs from each of four Hibiscus species for amplification in H. aponeurus and H. flavifolius. Eight loci were subsequently tested for genetic variation, but were found to be monomorphic in both species. Gene sequencing suggested that evolutionary changes within these loci could account for the lack of inter-individual variation.Partiall funded by grants DEB-0344519 and DBI-0963244 to AS from the National Science Foundatio

Use of a Small Unmanned Aerial System for the SR-530 Mudslide Incident near Oso, Washington

The Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue deployed three commercially available small unmanned aerial systems (SUASs)—an AirRobot AR100B quadrotor, an Insitu Scan Eagle, and a PrecisionHawk Lancaster—to the 2014 SR-530 Washington State mudslides. The purpose of the flights was to allow geologists and hydrologists to assess the eminent risk of loss of life to responders from further slides and flooding, as well as to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the event. The AirRobot AR100B in conjunction with PrecisionHawk postprocessing software created two-dimensional (2D) and 3D reconstructions of the inaccessible “moonscape” region of the slide and provided engineers with a real-time remote presence assessment of river mitigation activities. The AirRobot was able to cover 30–40 acres from an altitude of 42 m (140 ft) in 48 min of flight time and generate interactive 3D reconstructions in 3 h on a laptop in the field. The deployment is the 17th known use of SUAS for disasters, and it illustrates the evolution of SUASs from tactical data collection platforms to strategic data-to-decision systems. It was the first known instance in the United States in which an airspace deconfliction plan allowed a UAS to operate with manned vehicles in the same airspace during a disaster. It also describes how public concerns over SUAS safety and privacy led to the cancellation of initial flights. The deployment provides lessons on operational considerations imposed by the terrain, trees, power lines, and accessibility, and a safe human:robot ratio. The article identifies open research questions in computer vision, mission planning, and data archiving, curation, and mining

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with flying robots)

Seven flying robot “fairies” joined human actors in the Texas A&M production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production was a collaboration between the departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Theater Arts. The collaboration was motivated by two assertions. First, that the performing arts have principles for creating believable agents that will transfer to robots. Second, the theater is a natural testbed for evaluating the response of untrained human groups (both actors and the audience) to robots interacting with humans in shared spaces, i.e., were believable agents created? The production used two types of unmanned aerial vehicles, an AirRobot 100-b quadrotor platform about the size of a large pizza pan, and six E-flite Blade MCX palm-sized toy helicopters. The robots were used as alter egos for fairies in the play; the robots did not replace any actors, instead they were paired with them. The insertion of robots into the production was not widely advertised so the audience was the typical theatergoing demographic, not one consisting of people solely interested technology. The use of radio-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles provides insights into what types of autonomy are needed to create appropriate affective interactions with untrained human groups. The observations from the four weeks of practice and eight performances contribute (1) a taxonomy and methods for creating affect exchanges between robots and untrained human groups, (2) the importance of improvisation within robot theater, (3) insights into how untrained human groups form expectations about robots, and (4) awareness of the importance of safety and reliability as a design constraint for public engagement with robot platforms. The taxonomy captures that apparent affect can be created without explicit affective behaviors by the robot, but requires talented actors to convey the situation or express reactions. The audience’s response to robot crashes was a function of whether they had the opportunity to observe how the actors reacted to robot crashes on stage, suggesting that pre-existing expectations must be taken into account in the design of autonomy. Furthermore, it appears that the public expect robots to be more reliable (an expectation of consumer product hardening) and safe (an expectation from product liability) than the current capabilities and this may be a major challenge or even legal barrier for introducing robots into shared public spaces. These contributions are expected to inform design strategies for increasing public engagement with robot platforms through affect, and shows the value of arts-based approaches to public encounters with robots both for generating design strategies and for evaluation