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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 127 records · Page 7
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Autonomous Radiation Mapping and Quantification using an Unmanned Ground Vehicle. Part I - Environment Mapping

When characterizing facilities, advanced autonomous systems are safe, efficient, and cost-effective tools, which can safely deploy state-of-the-art instrumentation without exposing workers to radiation risks. One main focus of the research is the visual mapping of the environment.This paper presents a framework for the mapping aspect that utilizes lidar and SLAM technologies coupled with a monocular camera to create a point cloud of the environment. Upon completion, the present research work aims to provide an autonomous mobile robot the capability to localize itself and aid the user with visualizing the radiation data. Challenges: C++ node needs to properly synchronize image and point cloud data. 3D lidar has resolution of ± 3 cm. Proper camera calibration needed. Transforms need to be precise for proper alignment of image and point-cloud. Results: Voxelated point clouds. Accurate colors from calibrated cameras including details smaller than lidar resolution. Developed Robotics Operating System (ROS) package for ease of transfer to other robot platforms.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2020

Autonomous Radiation Mapping and Quantification using an Unmanned Ground Vehicle. Part II - Autonomous Navigation

Nuclear sites across the Unites States and other nations in the world, are prone to extreme radiation effects. To understand the radiation hazards, plan the cleanup efforts; and to meet the quality standards and guidelines, it is important to accurately characterize any nuclear facility. One of the current methods in characterizing facilities is the use of advanced autonomous systems. These are safe, efficient, and cost-effective tools, which can safely deploy state-of-the-art instrumentation without exposing workers to radiation risks. Conventional methods of taking radiation measurements by hand within or around the containment areas, and analyzing the collected data to obtain the result are: Ineffective, Puts scientists at risk of Radiation, Not cost-effective. The platform uses the Robotic Operating Systems (ROS) to integrate multiple sensors seamlessly. It can operate near real time by using a distributed processing system to handle large amounts of data: Surrounding cameras, A multi-channel 3D Lidar, Manipulator arm, High-performance gamma-ray spectrometer.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2025

Inspection and Mapping of Savannah River Site (SRS) Waste Tanks via Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) – 25351

The CSTF at SRS contain 51 waste tanks with 8 closed waste tanks between FTF and HTF. SRMC is the LW contractor. The LW mission includes removing legacy nuclear waste from these tanks and treating it for final disposition. Once the bulk of the waste has been removed from a tank, it will undergo inspection and sampling to characterize the remaining waste in the tank prior to it being operationally closed. There are multiple points in the tank closure process where an inspection is performed, and there are multiple parts of a tank that get inspected. Waste tanks have a primary containment vessel (referred to as the “Primary”) and a secondary containment vessel (referred to as the “Annulus”) that surrounds the primary. Both of these sections of a tank receive multiple inspections throughout the closure process.

Murphy, Lucas D. [Savannah River Mission Completio↗
DOE OSTI2021

Multimodal communication system

A multimodal communication system includes a vehicle controller that controls one or more systems or subsystems of an unmanned vehicle. The communication controller manages communication and logical access to the unmanned vehicle. One or more sensors in communication with the communication controller detects and measures physical properties in proximity to the unmanned vehicle. Transceivers receive the unmanned vehicle commands that are transmitted simultaneously or concurrently and a monotonic generator generates a monotonic object each time the unmanned vehicle's operating state changes. The communication controller executes the first unmanned vehicle command received that has the correct cryptographic hash validating knowledge of the unmanned vehicle's current operating state.

Duncan, Andrew M.↗
DOE OSTI2019

Evaluation of ARM tethered-balloon system instrumentation for supercooled liquid water and distributed temperature sensing in mixed-phase Arctic clouds

A tethered-balloon system (TBS) has been developed and is being operated by Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility in order to collect in situ atmospheric measurements within mixed-phase Arctic clouds. Periodic tethered-balloon flights have been conducted since 2015 within restricted airspace at ARM's Advanced Mobile Facility 3 (AMF3) in Oliktok Point, Alaska, as part of the AALCO (Aerial Assessment of Liquid in Clouds at Oliktok), ERASMUS (Evaluation of Routine Atmospheric Sounding Measurements using Unmanned Systems), and POPEYE (Profiling at Oliktok Point to Enhance YOPP Experiments) field campaigns. The tethered-balloon system uses helium-filled 34 m 3 helikites and 79 and 104 m 3 aerostats to suspend instrumentation that is used to measure aerosol particle size distributions, temperature, horizontal wind, pressure, relative humidity, turbulence, and cloud particle properties and to calibrate ground-based remote sensing instruments. Supercooled liquid water content (SLWC) sondes using the vibrating-wire principle, developed by Anasphere Inc., were operated at Oliktok Point at multiple altitudes on the TBS within mixed-hase clouds for over 200 h. Sonde-collected SLWC data were compared with liquid water content derived from a microwave radiometer, Ka-band ARM zenith radar, and ceilometer at the AMF3, as well as liquid water content derived from AMF3 radiosonde flights. The in situ data collected by the Anasphere sensors were also compared with data collected simultaneously by an alternative SLWC sensor developed at the University of Reading, UK; both vibrating-wire instruments were typically observed to shed their ice quickly upon exiting the cloud or reaching maximum ice loading. Temperature sensing measurements distributed with fiber optic tethered balloons were also compared with AMF3 radiosonde temperature measurements. Combined, the results indicate that TBS-distributed temperature sensing and supercooled liquid water measurements are in reasonably good agreement with remote sensing and radiosonde-based measurements of both properties. From these measurements and sensor evaluations, tethered-balloon flights are shown to offer an effective method of collecting data to inform and constrain numerical models, calibrate and validate remote sensing instruments, and characterize the flight environment of unmanned aircraft, circumventing the difficulties of in-cloud unmanned aircraft flights such as limited flight time and in-flight icing.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2020

Cooperative Routing for an Air–Ground Vehicle Team—Exact Algorithm, Transformation Method, and Heuristics

This paper considers a cooperative vehicle routing problem for an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission in the presence of communication constraints between the vehicles. The proposed framework uses a ground vehicle and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that travel cooperatively and visit a set of targets while satisfying the communication constraints. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program, and a branch-and-cut algorithm is developed to solve the problem to optimality. Furthermore, a transformation method and a heuristic are also developed for the problem. The effectiveness of all the algorithms is corroborated through extensive computational experiments on several randomly generated instances. Furthermore, this paper is motivated by an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission involving a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a ground vehicle, where the vehicles must coordinate their activity in the presence of communication constraints. The combination of a small UAV and a ground vehicle is an ideal platform for such missions, since small UAVs can fly at low altitudes and can avoid obstacles or threats that would be problematic for the ground vehicle alone. This paper addresses the coordinated routing problem involving these two vehicles and presents an algorithm to obtain an optimal solution for this problem, fast heuristics to obtain good feasible solutions, and also a transformation method to transform any instance of this cooperative vehicle routing problem to an instance of the one-in-a-set traveling salesman problem.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Drone Video Platform—Collision Avoidance, Situational Awareness, and Communications

Small unmanned aerial systems are ideal for delivering sensors into areas that are inaccessible or too dangerous for human entry or manned aircraft over-flights. The systems can fly low and slow for enhanced sensitivity and in tight spaces where ordinary aircraft could never fit. We have configured and flown sensor payloads for radiation, chemical, and optical detection on small fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft. All the sensor packages provide telemetry, GPS coordinates, LIDAR distance ranging, and absolute time of day to microsecond accuracy. Payload weights range from less than 1 kg up to 5.5 kg. Currently, communications are over 2.4 GHz and 915 MHz radios, as well as over 4G LTE cellular data links. Real-time data feeds from the sensor payloads to web browser clients anywhere in the world are possible via a virtual EC2 server on the Amazon AWS cloud. In FY 2019, the Nevada National Security Site teamed with Virginia Tech, H3D Corp., and Unmanned Systems, Inc. to accomplish the four flight missions described in this report. A large part of this year’s mission goals were to demonstrate the ability to fly beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS).

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2021

Development of a Miniaturized Mobile Mapping System for In-Row, Under-Canopy Phenotyping

This paper focuses on the development of a miniaturized mobile mapping platform with advantages over current agricultural phenotyping systems in terms of acquiring data that facilitate under-canopy plant trait extraction. The system is based on an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) for in-row, under-canopy data acquisition to deliver accurately georeferenced 2D and 3D products. The paper addresses three main aspects pertaining to the UGV development: (a) architecture of the UGV mobile mapping system (MMS), (b) quality assessment of acquired data in terms of georeferencing information as well as derived 3D point cloud, and (c) ability to derive phenotypic plant traits using data acquired by the UGV MMS. The experimental results from this study demonstrate the ability of the UGV MMS to acquire dense and accurate data over agricultural fields that would facilitate highly accurate plant phenotyping (better than above-canopy platforms such as unmanned aerial systems and high-clearance tractors). Plant centers and plant count with an accuracy in the 90% range have been achieved.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2020

Data generated during the 2018 LAPSE-RATE campaign: an introduction and overview

Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) offer innovative capabilities for providing new perspectives on the atmosphere, and therefore atmospheric scientists are rapidly expanding their use, particularly for studying the planetary boundary layer. In support of this expansion, from 14 to 20 July 2018 the International Society for Atmospheric Research using Remotely piloted Aircraft (ISARRA) hosted a community flight week, dubbed the Lower Atmospheric Profiling Studies at Elevation – a Remotely-piloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE; de Boer et al., 2020a). This field campaign spanned a 1-week deployment to Colorado's San Luis Valley, involving over 100 students, scientists, engineers, pilots, and outreach coordinators. These groups conducted intensive field operations using unmanned aircraft and ground-based assets to develop comprehensive datasets spanning a variety of scientific objectives, including a total of nearly 1300 research flights totaling over 250 flight hours. This article introduces this campaign and lays the groundwork for a special issue on the LAPSE-RATE project. The remainder of the special issue provides detailed overviews of the datasets collected and the platforms used to collect them. All of the datasets covered by this special issue have been uploaded to a LAPSE-RATE community set up at the Zenodo data archive (https://zenodo.org/communities/lapse-rate/, last access: 3 December 2020).

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2023

Minimizing Ground Risk in Cellular-Connected Drone Corridors With mmWave Links

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) have been receiving significant interest and support from academia, industry, and regulatory bodies over the past decade due to their various use cases. To safely integrate UAS operations into the national airspace, particularly overpopulated regions, the risk posed to ground users, buildings, and vehicles due to unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight should be minimized. This risk can be represented by a numerical metric, which we refer to in this article as the “ground risk.” Many UAS applications also depend on the presence of a reliable wireless communication link between the UAV and a control station for the transmission of UAV position, surveillance video, UAV payload commands, and other mission-related data. Such wireless communication requirements also need to be considered in the design of UAS operations. In this article, we consider both these aspects and study the design of nonintersecting trajectories for UAS operations to minimize ground risk, subject to constraints on the wireless signal strength and geometry of the trajectory, specified in terms of: 1) an enclosing cylinder within which the trajectory must lie and 2) an integrated angular change along the UAV's trajectory. The performance of a computationally expensive optimal algorithm is compared with that of a computationally faster heuristic approach within the dense urban environment of Manhattan, NY, USA. Performance evaluation using ray-tracing simulations shows that the heuristic approach performs close to the optimal algorithm at a reduced computation cost. In conclusion, this research can be utilized to make UAS operations safe and reliable and accelerate their adoption.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗