Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

George Mason robotics team showcases nine pioneering studies at international conference

Teresa Donnellan — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 16:00:26 +0000

George Mason robotics team showcases nine pioneering studies at international conference Teresa Donnellan Fri, 11/01/2024 - 12:00

In This Story

George Mason roboticists Xuesu Xiao, Xuan Wang, Daigo Shishika, and Gregory Stein presented nine papers at the 2024 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Robotics Society of Japan last month.

Roboticists Xuan Wang (upper left), Gregory Stein (upper right), Daigo Shishika (bottom left), and Xuesu Xiao (bottom right)

“Thanks to the hard work of our students and the support of our collaborators, we were able to present our research internationally at IROS 2024,” said Xuan Wang, who received the New Generation Star award at the conference, sponsored by Nokov, which he called, “a great encouragement for my career.”

“A few papers resulted from a joint project across George Mason’s departments of mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science, funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Tactical Behaviors for Autonomous Maneuver (TBAM) Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA),” said Xuesu Xiao.

The papers presented were as follows:

Active Information Gathering for Long-Horizon Navigation Under Uncertainty by Predicting the Value of Information

Authors: Raihan Islam Arnob and Gregory Stein.

Learning-informed Long-Horizon Navigation under Uncertainty for Vehicles with Dynamics

Authors: Abhish Khanal, Hoang-Dung Bui, Erion Plaku, and Gregory Stein

VANP: Learning Where to See for Navigation with Self-Supervised Vision-Action Pre-Training

Authors: Mohammad Nazeri, Junzhe Wang, Amirreza Payandeh, and Xuesu Xiao

DTG: Diffusion-based Trajectory Generation for Mapless Global Navigation

Author: Jing Liang, Amirreza Payandeh, Daeun Song, Xuesu Xiao, Dinesh Manocha

Bi-CL: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robots Coordination Through Bi-level Optimization

Authors: Zechen Hu, Daigo Shishika, Xuesu Xiao, Xuan Wang

Learning Coordinated Maneuver in Adversarial Environments

Authors: Zechen Hu, Manshi Limbu, Daigo Shishika, Xuesu Xiao, Xuan Wang

Team Coordination on Graphs: Problem, Analysis, and Algorithms

Authors: Yanlin Zhou, Manshi Limbu, Gregory Stein, Xuan Wang, Daigo Shishika, Xuesu Xiao

Terrain-Attentive Learning for Efficient 6-DoF Kinodynamic Modeling on Vertically Challenging Terrain

Authors: Aniket Datar, Chenhui Pan, Mohammad Nazeri, Anuj Pokhrel, Xuesu Xiao

D3G: Learning Multi-robot Coordination from Demonstrations

Authors: Yizhi Zhou, Wanxin Jin, Xuan Wang

Topics

robotics

mechanical engineering

Mechanical Engineering Faculty

Computer Science faculty

computer science

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Mason’s Rocketry Club soars at competition

Nanci Hellmich — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 19:08:55 +0000

Mason’s Rocketry Club soars at competition Nanci Hellmich Fri, 04/19/2019 - 15:08

Mason's Rocketry Club landed two first place awards in the Battle of the Rockets Competition. Pictured from left to right: Alex Maxseiner, Joe Coffin, Peter Goffe, Will McCarty, Eric Dau, Gary Quaresima, and Zac Yarashus.

Mason’s Rocketry Club captured first place awards in the target altitude event and the Mars rover challenge at the Battle of the Rockets Competition.

This is the second year the group won first place in the target altitude event.

Students from several engineering disciplines teamed up to make the rockets and rover, says Alex Maxseiner, president and founder of the club and a senior in computer engineering.

“We put in a lot of hard work, especially for the Mars rover (robot) challenge,” says Peter Goffe, the club treasurer and a junior majoring in mechanical engineering.

The target altitude event’s objective was to fly a rocket as close as possible to 1,001 feet. The club got three shots at reaching that goal; scoring is based on their best two attempts. Mason’s team was off by only 26 feet in its best two shots.

“Our new members took what we have learned from our experiences and were able to build a very consistent rocket, improving our score from last year,” Maxseiner says.

For the Mars rover (robot) challenge, the team designed a rocket and put a Mars rover inside. The rocket flew more than 1,000 feet, then deployed the rover, which landed safely using its parachute recovery system.

“It’s a little stressful when you are watching the rocket launch,” Goffe says. “If something malfunctions and falls without its recovery system, it’s unsalvageable for the competition. We focused on completing the simple tasks one hundred percent of the time.”

The club members built three rockets this year, working more than two months on that portion of the project. They had several practice launches before the competition, which was held April 13-14 in Culpeper, Virginia.

Maxseiner founded the club in 2016 because he and his peers wanted to get hands-on experience with their classroom work

Faculty advisor Harold A. Geller, Mason's Observatory director, has mentored the group, which welcomes people from all academic backgrounds. They’re looking for younger students to take over, “because most of us are seniors, and we want the club to live on after we graduate,” Maxseiner says.

Countdown to launch: Engineering students team up to reach the starry heights with a satellite

Nanci Hellmich — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 12:46:10 +0000

Countdown to launch: Engineering students team up to reach the starry heights with a satellite Nanci Hellmich Tue, 04/02/2019 - 08:46

"Everyone owned a piece of the project, which helped manage the workload."

— Lena Elhajj, a senior in systems engineering

“The ECE students looked at the project in terms of circuit components. The mechanical engineering seniors considered the materials that are allowed in space, and the systems engineering students were looking at whether the mission meets all the requirements and goals.”

— Hina Fatima, a senior in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

"It takes coordination to do a project this big. Testing is half the project, but it’s hard to believe it until you see it.”

— Matthew Herman, systems engineering senior

“The long-term goal is to engage senior design students in designing their own satellite and their own path to space.”

Peter Pachowicz, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

“We all had different ideas of how things should be laid out. Every time we have a meeting, we worked together and talked through our differences.”

— Brandon Goodrich, a senior in mechanical engineering

Mason Engineering students from three departments worked together on a senior design team to create three experiments that will be sent into the Earth's lower orbit on a small satellite, called a ThinSat. Pictured from left to right: Le Truong, Hina Fatima, Jeremiah Terrie, Alex Mourao, Brandon Goodrich, and Tameem Siddiquee.

Mason Engineering students took a giant leap into complex space-related research this year.

A senior design team with 14 students from three engineering departments worked together all year on three experiments that are being integrated into one small satellite about the size of two smartphones.

The satellite, called a ThinSat, is scheduled to take the science experiments into Earth’s lower orbit next spring on a rocket, whose main mission is to deliver cargo to NASA’s International Space Station. ThinSats piggyback on the cargo mission.

“The students from different disciplines cooperated to design, implement, and test the experiments and then integrated everything into an infrastructure that complies with NASA requirements,” says lead faculty advisor Peter Pachowicz, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Students in the Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research (SEOR) provided the parameters for the designs and helped test the projects after they were created, while seniors in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Mechanical Engineering (ME) created the hardware and software for the experiments, which include:

A new thermal battery shield to protect a lithium polymer battery from freezing temperatures during an eclipse, designed by the mechanical engineering students.
A method to scan a range of ultra-high radio frequencies used by ham radio to see which are suitable for inexpensive, low-bandwidth satellite communications in the Washington, D.C.-area, a project from the ECE seniors.
A comparison of two solar-powered systems to find out which is more efficient, also from the ECE students.

The students got experience in real-world engineering, says Lance Sherry, an associate professor in systems engineering and operations research. “When we build aircraft or other complex systems, there is never enough time, space, or energy.”

One of the biggest things the students learned in this is how to allocate limited resources to come up with an optimum design given the constraints, he says.

After the ECE and ME seniors built the components of the experiments, they gave them to the system engineering group to integrate into the ThinSat to start testing.

One test included putting the ThinSat onto a vibration table, then shaking the table for a couple of hours to simulate what it’s going to be like when the launch takes place. “It’s a very rough ride,” Sherry says.

Another test put the batteries into an increasing vacuum until they popped. “Better to find out what the limits of the design are in the lab than after it’s launched,” says Lena Elhajj, a systems engineering senior.

Teamwork was essential because complex engineering projects are rarely undertaken outside a multi-disciplinary environment, says Robert Gallo, director of senior projects for mechanical engineering.

Alex Mourao, Brandon Goodrich, and Esteban Perez, members of a senior design team called Asteria, are working on a new thermal battery shield to protect a lithium polymer battery.

Brandon Goodrich, a senior in mechanical engineering who dubbed the team Asteria after a Greek goddess of the stars, says the experience taught him valuable lessons about working with people with diverse design perspectives. “We all had different ideas of how things should be laid out. Every time we have a meeting, we worked together and talked through our differences.”

Hina Fatima, an ECE senior, agrees. “The ECE students looked at the project in terms of circuit components. The mechanical engineering seniors considered the materials that are allowed in space, and the systems engineering students were looking at whether the mission meets all the requirements and goals.”

Everyone owned a piece of the project, which helped manage the workload, Elhajj says.

It takes coordination to do a project this big, adds Matthew Herman, a systems engineering senior. “Testing is half the project, but it’s hard to believe it until you see it.”

Virginia Space and Twiggs Space Lab, the projects’ sponsors, are testing Mason’s ThinSat in a high altitude balloon to make sure everything is launch ready.

Next year, the satellite and other ThinSats are scheduled to launch in a rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, Wallops Island, Virginia.

Juniors are waiting in the wings to take over the projects, as well as design other experiments for another ThinSat, Pachowicz says.

He has other aspirations for future engineering students. “The long-term goal is to engage senior design students in designing their own satellite and their own path to space.”

“Mason is uniquely positioned to provide students this incredible hands-on learning opportunity in one of the fastest growing engineering fields,” Sherry says.

Let the countdown begin.

The seniors on the team included:

Electrical and Computer Engineering: Hina Fatima (lead) Gabe Haddad, Reagan Gillette, Tameem Siddiquee, Jay Deorukhkar, Jeremiah Terrie, Le Truong.

Mechanical Engineering: Brandon Goodrich (lead), Alex Mourao, Esteban Perez.

Systems Engineering: Lena Elhajj (lead), Matthew Herman (lead), Michael Jordan, Raghad Alahmadi.