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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 415 records · Page 23

Unique Results and Lessons Learned from the TSS Missions

In 1924, Irvin Langmuir and H. M. Mott-Smith published a theoretical model for the complex plasma sheath phenomenon in which they identified some very special cases which greatly simplified the sheath and allowed a closed solution to the problem. The most widely used application is for an electrostatic, or "Langmuir," probe in laboratory plasma. Although the Langmuir probe is physically simple (a biased wire) the theory describing its functional behavior and its current-voltage characteristic is extremely complex and, accordingly, a number of assumptions and approximations are used in the LMS model. These simplifications, correspondingly, place limits on the model's range of application. Adapting the LMS model to real-life conditions is the subject of numerous papers and dissertations. The Orbit-Motion Limited (OML) model that is widely used today is one of these adaptions that is a convenient means of calculating sheath effects. The OML equation for electron current collection by a positively biased body is simply: I is approximately equal to A x j(sub eo) x 2/√𝜋(phi)(exp ½) where A is the area of the body and phi is the electric potential on the body with respect to the plasma. Since the Langmuir probe is a simple biased wire immersed in plasma, it is particularly tempting to use the OML equation in calculating the characteristics of the long, highly biased wires of an Electric Sail in the solar wind plasma. However, in order to arrive at the OML equation, a number of additional simplifying assumptions and approximations (beyond those made by Langmuir-Mott-Smith) are necessary. The OML equation is a good approximation when all conditions are met, but it would appear that the Electric Sail problem lies outside of the limits of applicability.

Stone, Nobie H.↗

Reflecting on Planning Models: A Challenge for Verification and Validation of Planning Systems

We discuss the opportunities for autonomous sys- tems to perform reflection on their planners by adapting the models used to build plans. We first describe model-based planning systems, a form of automated planning system driven by declarative models of the planning domain. These models include descriptions of the conditions and effects of actions on the state of the world. When planning the activities of cyber-physical systems, the command and data representation of the system must be formally abstracted to the actions and states described in the planning system model. When the execution of a plan either fails or produces unexpected outcomes, the execution trace can be abstracted and compared to the predicted state according to the planning model, producing a list of discrepancies; these discrepancies can then be used to fix the model. This provides part of a reflection capability, namely, a set of well-formed problems with the domain model, the abstractions, or both. The challenge lies in the rest of the reflection capability, namely, a set of techniques for changing the models or the abstractions. We discuss these challenges and describe some of the options for addressing them

Mission Planning↗

L1 Adaptive Control with Switched Reference Models: Application to Learn-to-Fly

Learn-to-Fly (L2F) is a new framework that aims to replace the traditional iterative development paradigm for aerial vehicles with a combination of real-time aerodynamic modeling, guidance, and learning control. To ensure safe learning of the vehicle dynamics on the fly, this paper presents an L1 adaptive control (L1AC) based scheme, which actively estimates and compensates for the discrepancy between the intermediately learned dynamics and the actual dynamics. First, to incorporate the periodic update of the learned model within the L2F framework, this paper extends the L1AC architecture to handle a switched reference system subject to unknown time-varying parameters and disturbances. The paper also includes analysis of both transient and steady-state performance of the L1AC architecture in the presence of non-zero initialization error for the state predictor. Second, the paper presents how the proposed L1AC scheme is integrated into the L2F framework, including its interaction with the baseline controller and the real-time modeling module. Finally, flight tests on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) validate the efficacy of the proposed control and learning scheme.

Steven Snyder↗

An adaptive inverse kinematics algorithm for robot manipulators

An adaptive algorithm for solving the inverse kinematics problem for robot manipulators is presented. The algorithm is derived using model reference adaptive control (MRAC) theory and is computationally efficient for online applications. The scheme requires no a priori knowledge of the kinematics of the robot if Cartesian end-effector sensing is available, and it requires knowledge of only the forward kinematics if joint position sensing is used. Computer simulation results are given for the redundant seven-DOF robotics research arm, demonstrating that the proposed algorithm yields accurate joint angle trajectories for a given end-effector position/orientation trajectory.

Colbaugh, R.↗

Design, Development, and Use of a Lunar Lander Simulation for NASA's Artemis Program

This paper describes the design, development, and initial use of a generalized and configurable lunar lander simulation to support NASA’s Artemis Program. This simulation is being developed for the Crew Compartment Office (CrewCo) in the Human Landing Systems (HLS) program and is called the HLS CrewCo Lander Simulation (HCLS). The HCLS provides insight into the challenges associated with returning humans to the Moon and the particular difficulties of operating at the Lunar South Pole. The simulation models a generalized integrated lunar landing spacecraft based on a government reference design but can and has been adapted to model vendor specific designs as well. The simulation architecture and tool sets provide a flexible framework that allows for quickly prototyping and evaluating various aspects of a piloted lunar landing system. This includes the modeling of all principal human controlled flight phases: rendezvous and docking with crew transfer systems; docked orbital outpost operations; undocking and lunar transfer; lunar orbital operations; lunar deorbit, descent, and landing (DDL); lunar surface operations; lunar ascent; and return to the orbital outpost. The flexibility of the simulation allows for the integrated evaluation of potential vehicle subsystems, crew displays, guidance and control modes, and trajectory designs. The purpose of the HCLS is not to design the ideal lunar lander, but rather to understand and the strengths and weaknesses of vehicle design choices. This paper describes the basic simulation architecture and discusses the tool sets used to develop the HCLS. This includes a number of open source tool sets and publicly available data sets. This paper also describes some of the early use cases and findings. The primary focus of early HCLS use has been on the manual piloting task to safely get the crew to the desired landing site in case of a failure in the automated guidance system. Several guidance modes and cues have been implemented which allow a pilot to manually fly the vehicle to the targeted landing site starting anywhere from powered descent initiation. It has been a valuable tool for understanding what is required to manually fly a lunar lander as well as giving a sense of the vehicle dynamics, which are much different than anything that is flown on Earth. A number of experienced test pilots have participated in manual piloting evaluations using the HCLS and provided valuable feedback on the piloting task which has been very beneficial to NASA and the HLS program.

James Michael Gentile↗

Pilot Evaluation of Adaptive Control in Motion-Based Flight Simulator

The objective of this work is to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and robustness characteristics of several MRAC (Model-Reference Adaptive Control) based adaptive control technologies garnering interest from the community as a whole. To facilitate this, a control study using piloted and unpiloted simulations to evaluate sensitivities and handling qualities was conducted. The adaptive control technologies under consideration were ALR (Adaptive Loop Recovery), BLS (Bounded Linear Stability), Hybrid Adaptive Control, L1, OCM (Optimal Control Modification), PMRAC (Predictor-based MRAC), and traditional MRAC

Kaneshige, John T.↗

FunDiff: diffusion models over function spaces for physics-informed generative modeling

Recent advances in generative modeling-particularly diffusion models and flow matching-have been widely used for synthesizing discrete data such as images and videos. However, adapting these models to physical applications remains challenging, as the quantities of interest are continuous functions governed by complex physical laws. To address this, we introduce FunDiff, an efficient and robust framework for generative modeling in function spaces. FunDiff combines a latent diffusion process with a function autoencoder architecture to handle input functions with varying discretizations, generates continuous functions that can be evaluated at arbitrary locations, and seamlessly incorporate physical priors. These priors are enforced through architectural constraints or physics-informed loss functions, ensuring that generated samples satisfy fundamental physical laws. We theoretically establish minimax optimality guarantees for density estimation in function spaces, demonstrating that diffusion-based estimators achieve optimal convergence rates under suitable regularity conditions. We further demonstrate the practical effectiveness of FunDiff across diverse applications in fluid dynamics and solid mechanics. Empirical results indicate that our method can generate physically consistent samples with high fidelity to the target distribution, and exhibit robustness to noisy and low-resolution data.

Wang, Sifan [Yale University, New Haven, CT (Unite↗

Theoretical modeling of hepatitis C acute infection in liver-humanized mice support pre-clinical assessment of candidate viruses for controlled-human-infection studies

Designing and carrying out a controlled human infection (CHI) model for hepatitis C virus (HCV) is critical for vaccine development. However, key considerations for a CHI model protocol include understanding of the earliest viral-host kinetic events during the acute phase and susceptibility of the viral isolate under consideration for use in the CHI model to antiviral treatment before any infections in human volunteers can take place. Humanized mouse models lack adaptive immune responses but provide a unique opportunity to obtain quantitative understanding of early HCV kinetics and develop mathematical models to further understand viral and innate immune response dynamics during acute HCV infection. We show that the models reproduce the measured HCV kinetics in humanized mice, which are consistent with early acute HCV-host dynamics in immunocompetent chimpanzees. Our findings suggest that humanized mice are well-suited to support development of a CHI model. In-silico and in-vivo modeling estimates provide a starting point to characterize candidate viruses for testing in CHI model studies.

Agent-based modeling↗

An AD100 implementation of a real-time STOVL aircraft propulsion system

A real-time dynamic model of the propulsion system for a Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) aircraft was developed for the AD100 simulation environment. The dynamic model was adapted from a FORTRAN based simulation using the dynamic programming capabilities of the AD100 ADSIM simulation language. The dynamic model includes an aerothermal representation of a turbofan jet engine, actuator and sensor models, and a multivariable control system. The AD100 model was tested for agreement with the FORTRAN model and real-time execution performance. The propulsion system model was also linked to an airframe dynamic model to provide an overall STOVL aircraft simulation for the purposes of integrated flight and propulsion control studies. An evaluation of the AD100 system for use as an aircraft simulation environment is included.

Ouzts, Peter J.↗

A Regional Model Study of Synoptic Features Over West Africa

Synoptic weather features over West Africa were studied in simulations by the regional simulation model (RM) at the NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies. These pioneering simulations represent the beginning of an effort to adapt regional models for weather and climate prediction over West Africa. The RM uses a cartesian grid with 50 km horizontal resolution and fifteen vertical levels. An ensemble of four simulations was forced with lateral boundary conditions from ECMWF global analyses for the period 8-22 August 1988. The simulated mid-tropospheric circulation includes the skillful development and movement of several African wave disturbances. Wavelet analysis of mid-tropospheric winds detected a dominant periodicity of about 4 days and a secondary periodicity of 5-8 days. Spatial distributions of RM precipitation and precipitation time series were validated against daily rain gauge measurements and ISCCP satellite infrared cloud imagery. The time-space distribution of simulated precipitation was made more realistic by combining the ECMWR initial conditions with a 24-hr spin-up of the moisture field and also by damping high frequency gravity waves by dynamic initialization. Model precipitation "forecasts" over the Central Sahel were correlated with observations for about three days, but reinitializing with observed data on day 5 resulted in a dramatic improvement in the precipitation validation over the remaining 9 days. Results imply that information via the lateral boundary conditions is not always sufficient to minimize departures between simulated and actual precipitation patterns for more than several days. In addition, there was some evidence that the new initialization may increase the simulations' sensitivity to the quality of lateral boundary conditions.

Druyan, Leonard M.↗

Model-based iterative reconstruction with adaptive regularization for artifact reduction in electron tomography

Obtaining high-quality 3D reconstructions from electron tomography of crystalline particles embedded in lighter support elements is crucial for various material systems such as catalysts for fuel cell applications. However, significant challenges arise due to the limited tilt range, sparse and low signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements. In addition, small metal particles can cause strong streaking and shading artifacts in the 3D reconstructions when using conventional reconstruction algorithms due to the presence of Bragg diffraction and the large scattering cross-section difference between the materials of the particles and the background support regions. These artifacts lead to errors in the downstream characterization affecting extraction of critical features such as the size of the metal particles, their distribution and the volume of the lighter support regions. In this paper, we present a two-stage algorithm based on metal artifact reduction, utilizing model-based iterative reconstruction methods with adaptive adjustment of regularization parameters. Our approach yields high-quality 3D reconstructions compared to traditional algorithms, accurately capturing both the metal particles as well as the background support. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm through simulated and experimental bright-field electron tomography data, showing significant improvements in reconstruction quality compared to traditional methods.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Use of model-based qualitative icons and adaptive windows in workstations for supervisory control systems

The effectiveness of an operator interface using qualitative icons and dynamic windows designed and controlled by means of an operator function model is demonstrated, and the simulation system, the Georgia Tech-Multisatellite Operations Control Center, is described. Qualitative icons are used to integrate low-level quantitative data into high-level qualitative error detection mechanisms, and window technology is used for the simultaneous display of multiple data sources that reflect different aspects of the system state. Based on eleven experimental measures, the workstation incorporating the model-based qualitative icons and dynamic operator function window sets was found to perform better than the conventional workstation.

Mitchell, Christine M.↗

Adaptive Control Of Remote Manipulator

Robotic control system causes remote manipulator to follow closely reference trajectory in Cartesian reference frame in work space, without resort to computationally intensive mathematical model of robot dynamics and without knowledge of robot and load parameters. System, derived from linear multivariable theory, uses relatively simple feedforward and feedback controllers with model-reference adaptive control.

Seraji, Homayoun↗

Adaptive Control in the Presence of Simultaneous Sensor Bias and Actuator Failures

The problem of simultaneously accommodating unknown sensor biases and unknown actuator failures in uncertain systems is considered in a direct model reference adaptive control (MRAC) setting for state tracking using state feedback. Sensor biases and actuator faults may be present at the outset or may occur at unknown instants of time during operation. A modified MRAC law is proposed, which combines sensor bias estimation with control gain adaptation for accommodation of sensor biases and actuator failures. This control law is shown to provide signal boundedness in the resulting system. For the case when an external asymptotically stable sensor bias estimator is available, an MRAC law is developed to accomplish asymptotic state tracking and signal boundedness. For a special case wherein biases are only present in the rate measurements and bias-free position measurements are available, an MRAC law is developed using a model-independent bias estimator, and is shown to provide asymptotic state tracking with signal boundedness.

Joshi, Suresh M.↗

Neurosymbolic Hybrid Approach to Driver Collision Warning

There are two main algorithmic approaches to autonomous driving systems: (1) An end-to-end system in which a single deep neural network learns to map sensory input directly into appropriate warning and driving responses. (2) A mediated hybrid recognition system in which a system is created by combining independent modules that detect each semantic feature. While some researchers believe that deep learning can solve any problem, others believe that a more engineered and symbolic approach is needed to cope with complex environments with less data. Deep learning alone has achieved state-of-the-art results in many areas, from complex gameplay to predicting protein structures. In particular, in image classification and recognition, deep learning models have achieved accuracies as high as humans. But sometimes it can be very difficult to debug if the deep learning model doesn't work. Deep learning models can be vulnerable and are very sensitive to changes in data distribution. Generalization can be problematic. It's usually hard to prove why it works or doesn't. Deep learning models can also be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Here, we combine deep learning-based object recognition and tracking with an adaptive neurosymbolic network agent, called the Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS), that can adapt to its environment by building concepts based on perceptual sequences. We achieved an improved intersection-over-union (IOU) object recognition performance of 0.65 in the adaptive retraining model compared to IOU 0.31 in the COCO data pre-trained model. We improved the object detection limits using RADAR sensors in a simulated environment, and demonstrated the weaving car detection capability by combining deep learning-based object detection and tracking with a neurosymbolic model.

Wang, Pei↗

Survey of adaptive control using Liapunov design

A survey of the literature in which Liapunov's second method is used in determining the control law is presented, with emphasis placed on the model-tracking adaptive control problem. Forty references are listed. Following a brief tutorial exposition of the adaptive control problem, the techniques for treating reduction of order, disturbance and time-varying parameters, multivariable systems, identification, and adaptive observers are discussed. The method is critically evaluated, particularly with respect to possibilities for application.

Lindorff, D. P.↗

Necessary and sufficient conditions for parameter convergence in adaptive control

Consideration is given to the concept of a reference signal which is sufficient to cause the parameter error in an adaptive control system to converge to zero. Simple and necessary conditions for the convergence of the parameter error are established for a model reference adaptive control (MRAC) system having a relative degree of one. The exponential stability of the MRAC under persistent excitation (PE) is also considered. Full proofs of the theoretical arguments are given in a companion paper.

Boyd, S.↗

Adaptive Control for Linear Uncertain Systems with Unmodeled Dynamics Revisited via Optimal Control Modification

This paper presents the optimal control modification for linear uncertain plants. The Lyapunov analysis shows that the modification parameter has a limiting value depending on the nature of the uncertainty. The optimal control modification exhibits a linear asymptotic property that enables it to be analyzed in a linear time invariant framework for linear uncertain plants. The linear asymptotic property shows that the closed-loop plants in the limit possess a scaled input-output mapping. Using this property, we can derive an analytical closed-loop transfer function in the limit as the adaptive gain tends to infinity. The paper revisits the Rohrs counterexample problem that illustrates the nature of non-robustness of model-reference adaptive control in the presence of unmodeled dynamics. An analytical approach is developed to compute exactly the modification parameter for the optimal control modification that stabilizes the plant in the Rohrs counterexample. The linear asymptotic property is also used to address output feedback adaptive control for non-minimum phase plants with a relative degree 1.

Unmodeled Dynamics↗