News

Members of the Autonomous Systems Lab, in collaboration with researchers from Iowa State University and Purdue University, have published a monograph on the effective use of formal methods for autonomous systems. This monograph offers a comprehensive exploration into the modeling, analysis, and synthesis of behaviors in autonomous systems that are inherently designed to be correct via mathematical methods and computational tools.

UT collaborates with the U.S. Air Force on space research, as discussed by Michael Hibbard, a graduate research assistant from the Center for Autonomy, in a conversation with FOX 7 Austin. They explored the challenges and potential of the underutilized Cislunar regime, addressing spacecraft astrodynamics, autonomous operations, and the implications for the future of space travel, including NASA's Artemis program.

The University of Texas at Austin is leading a research collaboration with a $4 million grant from the CFIRE program, sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The project, named "Representations, Theory, and Algorithms for Autonomous Space Domain Awareness in the Cislunar Regime," aims to enhance the U.S. Air Force's ability to monitor and understand activities in the complex Cislunar space between Earth and the moon, which poses unique challenges due to gravitational forces.

Ufuk Topcu recently contributed to three government requests for information from PCAST and TIP.

The Center for Autonomy at the Oden Institute for Computational Sciences is proud to showcase our recent Spring and Summer graduates. These graduates are now equipped to make a meaningful and positive impact on the field as they embark on their new career paths.

The Center for Autonomy at the Oden Institute led the Introductory Research Experience in Autonomy and Control Technologies (REACT), an undergraduate research initiative under the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. In collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin, the University of New Mexico, and Hampton University, the program catered to aerospace, computer science, and mathematics students, providing a two-week opportunity for collaboration with graduates and hands-on research exposure. With support from NASA and the National Science Foundation, REACT empowered students to engage in autonomy-related research.

Our paper entitled "Autonomous Drifting with 3 Minutes of Data via Learned Tire Models" has been selected as a finalist for the ICRA 2023 Outstanding Dynamics and Control paper award and has been featured in Video Friday. Video Friday publishes a weekly selection of awesome robotics videos collected at IEEE Spectrum Robotics and this week, they feature a special selection of videos from ICRA 2023.

Commercial airplanes can be controlled by autopilot. But what happens if a wing gets damaged or an engine malfunctions? Is it possible to design a software system with a feedback loop — a system that quickly tests how controls operate on the damaged vessel and makes adjustments on the fly to give it the best chance of landing safely?

Texas Engineers are leading a multi-university research team, funded by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, that will build technology and tools to improve measurement of important climate factors by observing atoms in outer space. They will focus on the concept of quantum sensing, which involves observing how atoms react to small changes in their environment, and using that to infer the time-variations in the gravity field of the Earth. This will enable scientists to improve how accurately several important climate processes can be measured, such as the sea level rise, the rate of ice melt, the changes in land water resources and ocean heat storage changes.

The "Autonomous Aerial Cargo Operations at Scale" program held a roundtable at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. This roundtable aimed to validate their CONOPS that characterized six relevant operational scenarios. The purpose was to define research questions that the team would address and to identify potential datasets or information that could be used to answer these questions. The team sought feedback and discussions with local Appalachia stakeholders to determine if the proposed scenarios were realistic, feasible, and pertinent and to enable autonomous operations in both rural Appalachia and dense metropolitan areas. Participants engaged with experts from Purdue University, MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Morgan State University, and Cavan Solutions.