Eric Frew News

The College Where Drones Are Everywhere

Jeff Zehnder — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:23:57 +0000

The College Where Drones Are Everywhere Jeff Zehnder Fri, 10/31/2025 - 14:23

RAAVEN fixed-wing drone in flight.

Fixed wing and multirotor drone research at the University of Colorado Boulder are being spotlighted by The Chronicle for Higher Education.

The publication has posted a long feature article about the use of uncrewed aerial systems on campus and in field research.

Professors Brian Argrow and Eric Frew, as well as Associate Professor Nisar Ahmed were all interviewed for in the piece. All three are experts on the development and operation of uncrewed aerial or ground robot systems.

The article discusses ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��'s history with the technology, starting in 1994, when they drones were little known and very hard to come by.

Today, such systems are widespread on campus, said Dan Hesselius, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��'s director of flight operations.

“Ten years ago, we just had a few researchers flying drones on campus, but now we have dozens and dozens of researchers in nearly every college on campus that fly drones,” he said. “We also have our facilities people, whether that’s for housing and dining facilities or regular facilities. Athletics flies drones for the purposes of capturing footage of practices. Our police department flies drones for public safety, and has many uses that are on the horizon in that front. Even our media relations.”

Read the full article at The Chronicle for Higher Education...

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Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest U.S. hail study in 40 years

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 20:41:36 +0000

Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest U.S. hail study in 40 years Jeff Zehnder Tue, 06/17/2025 - 14:41

Gray clouds swirl above a dusty highway in eastern Colorado between the towns of Akron and Atwood—what’s left of a thunderstorm that rolled through this stretch of prairie and rangeland just minutes before.

Wind whistles through patches of stubbly grass nearby. Then a hiss and a pop break the silence. A group of researchers release a blast of compressed air to fling a flying drone from a metal scaffold, or “catapult,” sitting on top of a white SUV. The uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) measures more than 6 feet from wingtip to wingtip. It catches the wind, and its rear propeller buzzes to life, lifting the plane dozens of feet into the air in a matter of seconds.

Céu Gómez-Faulk makes adjustments to the RAAVEN drone. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��)

The IRISS team rides out an oncoming storm near Wichita, Kansas. (Patrick Campbell/��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��)

The chase is on.

Aerospace engineering sciences Professor Brian Argrow and his team at the University of Colorado Boulder have joined a research project called the In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains, or ICECHIP. For six weeks this summer, scientists from 15 U.S. research institutions and three overseas are criss-crossing the country from Colorado east to Iowa and from Texas to North Dakota.

They’re searching for summer thunderstorms.

The group is exploring the conditions that give rise to hail in this part of the country—peaking in the summer and causing billions of dollars of damage every year. In the United States, hail is most common in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and nearby regions, which are sometimes dubbed “hail alley.” Today, ice the size of grapes and even bigger litter the side of Colorado’s State Highway 63.

The campaign is led by Rebecca Adams-Selin at the company Atmospheric and Environmental Research and is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It’s the largest effort to study hail in the United States in 40 years.

The researchers hope to understand not just how ice forms miles above the ground, but also how homeowners and builders can protect their properties from dangerous weather. They’ll do that by using radar to peer inside hailstorms. They’ll collect and freeze hailstones, and they’ll crush hail in vice-like devices to see how strong it is. Argrow’s team is usings its drone to map the swaths of hail that storms leave behind them in their wake.

“It is about saving lives and saving property,” said Argrow, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and director of the Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) research center at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��. “We’re working with meteorologists and atmospheric scientists trying to increase warning times to give people a chance to get to safety and work with engineers and insurance companies to build better infrastructure to withstand these onslaughts.”

His team pilots the plane, known as the RAAVEN, short for Robust Autonomous Airborne Vehicle - Endurant and Nimble, north toward the rear flank of the thunderstorm. Then, they jump into two SUVs and follow the drone as it flies as low as 120 feet above them. A camera in the plane’s belly captures the ice trailing behind the storm. From that vantage point, the landscape, normally brown dotted with green, now also has pearly white patches for hundreds of yards in either direction.

For Céu Gómez-Faulk, who’s piloting the drone today, the sight is a testament to thunderstorms.

“It’s awe-inspiring in a very serious sort of way,” said Gómez-Faulk, a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences.

Credit: College of Engineering and Applied Science

Dark skies

Five days earlier, Argrow and his team from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� join the ICECHIP armada at a Phillips 66 gas station in Greensburg, Kansas. The crew includes three graduate students, two IRISS employees and Eric Frew, professor of aerospace engineering sciences. They’re marking the first day of the project’s field season, or what the researchers call Intensive Observation Period 1 (IOP 1).

Judging by the conditions, the team should have plenty to study today. Weathervanes sitting on top of vans whip in circles as gusts blow a misty rain through Greensburg, a town in south central Kansas that is home to just over 700 people.

What makes hail

When conditions are right in states like Kansas and Colorado, winds blowing over the prairie can start to lift upward, forming a powerful column of rising air. These updrafts can push clouds from the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, up to the colder stratosphere, which begins miles above Earth’s surface.

Within those towering, cauliflower-like clouds, tiny drops of water may freeze, then bounce around in the air—a sort of atmospheric game of Plinko.

That’s how hail is born.

“It starts with what we call a hail embryo, or ice,” said Katja Friedrich, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��. “It goes through the cloud, and it accumulates supercooled liquid, which is liquid that is below freezing. The embryos accumulate more and more until they fall.”

But there’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about what happens inside the clouds.

To help find out, Friedrich is participating in the ICECHIP campaign through an effort that’s separate from Argrow’s team and its drone. Over the summer, two researchers in her lab, Jack Whiting and Brady Herron, are traveling with the armada in a red pickup truck. They’re using a device called a microwave radiometer to collect measurements of the air that rushes into hailstorms from outside—exploring how environmental conditions can feed a storm to keep it churning, or even cause it to die off.

“It’s my dream to be doing this, to be in the field studying severe weather,” said Whiting, who graduated from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric and oceanic sciences in spring 2025. “There’s a good chance that these events are going to become more frequent in the future because of climate change, so it’s really important to understand these dangerous storms.”

“This is relatively typical this time of the year, mid-May for the Great Plains. That’s when the storms really turn up and pass through,” Argrow said. “If you live in this area, you know what this means.”

In Greensburg, they definitely do.

In 2007, a tornado ripped through the heart of this community, damaging or destroying more than 1,400 homes and buildings and killing 10 people. Just hours after the ICECHIP crew departed on May 18 this spring, another tornado touched down south of Greensburg. It traveled 11 miles before dying out, and no injuries were reported.

Argrow is no stranger to the danger storms bring. He grew up in Stroud, Oklahoma, in the heart of Tornado Alley and remembers sheltering in his family’s storm cellar during severe weather warnings.

The engineer and his colleagues previously worked on a project, led by long-time collaborator. Adam Houston of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, called Targeted Observation by Radar and UAS of Supercells (TORUS). Over two seasons, the group flew RAAVEN aircraft into supercell thunderstorms, the phenomena that give rise to dangerous tornadoes.

But while storm-chasers may pay a lot of attention to those kinds of weather events, hail causes more damage than tornadoes every year, said Ian Giammanco. He’s the lead research meteorologist for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a non-profit organization supported by property insurance and reinsurance companies.

Since 2012, hail has caused an estimated $280 billion worth of damage in the United States, according to IBHS estimates. The largest piece of hail ever discovered was about 8 inches wide, the size of a large cantaloupe.

“Our role is to understand how we can design better building materials to withstand hail,” said Giammanco, whose team is joining the ICECHIP expedition on the road. “Whether it’s a lot of small hail, or these really big hailstones, we want to understand what that risk looks like.”

Ellington Smith, a graduate student on Argrow’s team, was an undergrad at Iowa State University in spring 2023 when hailstorms erupted around the state, flattening corn fields.

“Knowing what hail can do to farmland, its’ really important to be able to quantify the damage—figuring out why these hailstorms happen and how to better predict them,” Smith said.

Intrepid aircraft

Adams-Selin and the ICECHIP team are taking what she calls a “holistic” approach to studying those kinds of dangers.

The study armada is something to behold: At the start of the field season, the ICECHIP campaign included around 100 researchers traveling in more than 20 vehicles—including pickup trucks with mesh canopies overhead to protect them from hail damage and two Doppler on Wheels trucks. These massive vehicles carry portable, swiveling radar dishes that can peer into the heart of hailstorms.

“ICECHIP is 100% NSF funded,” Adams-Selin said. “If you want to know who is responsible for improved hail forecasts, better understanding of hail science and any of these technological advances that we are using, like mobile radar, that is all NSF funding.”

The IRISS team depends on a vehicle that is a little smaller—the RAAVEN.

It’s a tough little drone. The aircraft is based off a kit designed by the company Ritewing RC. This same design inspired a storm-chasing drone that appeared in the 2024 summer blockbuster Twisters. The body of the RAAVEN is made from the same kind of foam that’s in your car bumper. It also carries sensors for measuring wind speeds and air pressure, temperature and humidity.

If the RAAVEN is flying with the wind, it can hit speeds of 75 miles per hour or more, and the aircraft can fly for up to two hours uninterrupted.

“Radar can only tell you so much,” said Frew, who joins Argrow on the ICECHIP campaign. “To really further our understanding of the atmosphere, you have to be in it.”

For ICECHIP, the team also added a 360-degree camera that drops out of the belly of the RAAVEN after it launches.

The IRISS team’s key role on the ICECHIP campaign is to measure the swaths of hail that storms leave in their wake.

A storm builds near Greensburg, Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��)

The team doesn’t fly the RAAVEN directly into storms for ICECHIP. Instead, it stays safely behind the bad weather, soaring in a zig-zag pattern in the wake of hailstorms as they billow across the landscape. Using the drone’s camera in real-time, the researchers view the area below that’s covered in ice. They can then measure the width of these hail swaths, capturing how big a storm’s path of destruction can grow. Argrow likens it to “a snail that leaves a trail.”

Federal Aviation Administration rules require Argrow’s team to stay in sight of the RAAVEN at all times. To do that, the researchers get in their SUVs.

Gómez-Faulk explained that the RAAVEN is semi-autonomous. Pilots like him can control where the aircraft goes, but it’s also programed to follow a sort of digital marker the team refers to as a “carrot.”

“There’s a carrot guide point that we set off some distance from the car, usually in front of the car,” he said. “The aircraft is going to chase that guide point as we drive.”

Heart pounding

Back in Greensburg, Frew emphasizes that safety is the number one priority of the IRISS team. But he acknowledges that central Kansas at the height of storm season may be an odd place to find an aerospace engineer.

Before Frew started working on projects like TORUS and ICECHIP, he didn’t know a lot about weather. His time on these studies, however, has taught him to respect the power of storms—and what engineers can accomplish when they bring their work out of the lab and into the real, windy world.

“The first time I did it, my heart was pounding. I didn’t know what to expect,” Frew said. “In order to understand this environment, someone has to go into it and take the measurements, and that’s what we’re here for.”

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� leading 10-university uncrewed aerial systems communications project

Jeff Zehnder — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:38:21 +0000

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� leading 10-university uncrewed aerial systems communications project Jeff Zehnder Thu, 04/10/2025 - 09:38

Jeff Zehnder

Partners for the NASA ULI Communication-Aware Dispersed Autonomy and Safety (CODAS) grant

University of Colorado Boulder
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Texas at El Paso
University of Colorado Colorado Springs
Stanford University in California
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
North Carolina State University
University of California in Santa Barbara
El Paso Community College in Texas
Durham Technical Community College in North Carolina
Center for Autonomous Air Mobility and Sensing
Aurora Flight Sciences
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory

Eric Frew is heading a major project to improve drone communications in anticipation of a future when autonomous aircraft regularly whizz overhead for everything from product deliveries to emergency response.

A professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Frew is the principal investigator of an $8 million, four-year NASA University Leadership Initiative grant to ensure safe and assured operation of commercial autonomous aircraft in populated areas.

“These are complex scenarios -- a drone flying from Denver International Airport to Boulder to drop off a package or using drones to monitor wildfires. Consider the benefit if the Boulder Fire Department could dispatch a drone the moment there’s an incident t so it gets there before police or fire crews,” Frew said.

Communications with consumer-grade quad copters are fairly standardized, but Frew’s team will be studying a much more complex problem – drones that navigate miles from their operator across challenging terrain where line-of-sight communication with a base station is no longer possible.

In such cases, cellular networks are the most likely solution for controlling the drone, but that presents unique challenges.

“Wireless communication is hard,” Frew said. “We’ve all had cell phone signals drop out. That’s fine on the phone with a family member. But if you’re commanding a flying drone, that’s a problem.”

The project team comprises some of the best minds in drones, radio signaling and computer science across 10 universities and colleges; the Center for Autonomous Air Mobility and Sensing research partnership; Boeing subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences; and the nonprofit Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.

Ismail Guvenc is a partner on the project. An electrical engineering professor at North Carolina State University, he leads a major aerial experimentation laboratory that will offer the team opportunities to develop and test uncrewed aerial system concepts in a real-world outdoor testbed.

“This is advancing the state of the art in an area of critical and timely significance for the United States. We’ll be modeling the behavior of agents, interference, and data in hybrid airborne-terrestrial networks and their impact on the overall performance of the communication network. We will also be supporting real-world experiments and testing needs of project partners at Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW),” Guvenc said.

Part of the research will focus on designing flight corridors that ensure continued communication. In the case of a trip from DIA to Boulder, that could mean designing a pathway that stays close to cell towers, rather than following the most direct route. Another possibility is using multiple drones as a mesh relay network.

“The transmission would multi-hop back through each drone. We can’t control the ground communications, but we can exploit our own,” Frew said.

Relay networks will be particularly important in sparsely populated areas with fewer cell towers, like during wildfire response in the Rocky Mountains.

This is part of a larger vision of how our work can help society. The goal is to provide tools to industry to understand and exploit the dynamic communications environment in urban, suburban, rural and remote areas.” - Eric Frew

“How do we organize stakeholders in that environment? We want to be able to manage team formations, routing and planning so we can work in a hybrid communications system that alternates between air-to-air and air-to-ground communications seamlessly,” Frew said.

Managing that complex interplay will be an area of study for multiple partners on the project, including Philip Brown, an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. His work focuses on using game theory to inform the design of networked control systems.

“My lab studies the way that network structure impacts team performance for loosely connected teams, which is what a group of drones are in this case. We’re evaluating and predicting the performance of network structures, and also using network structures to inform the decisions made by individual autonomous aircraft,” Brown said.

A key objective of the project is technology transfer to industry. While some grants focus more on early stage research, Frew emphasized their plan to develop software and data to assist business and government going forward.

“This is part of a larger vision of how our work can help society,” Frew said. “The goal is to provide tools to industry to understand and exploit the dynamic communications environment in urban, suburban, rural and remote areas.”

Eric Frew is heading a major project to improve drone communications in anticipation of a future when autonomous aircraft regularly whizz overhead for...

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Building next generation autonomous robots to serve humanity

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 23:11:12 +0000

Building next generation autonomous robots to serve humanity Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/17/2023 - 16:11

Jeff Zehnder

One thousand feet underground, a four-legged creature scavenges through tunnels in pitch darkness. With vision that cuts through the blackness, it explores a spider web of paths, remembering its every step and navigating with precision. The sound of its movements echo eerily off the walls, but it is not to be feared – this is no wild animal; it is an autonomous rescue robot.

Initially designed to find survivors in collapsed mines, caves, and damaged buildings, that is only part of what it can do.

Created by a team of University of Colorado Boulder researchers and students, the robots placed third as the top US entry and earned $500,000 in prize money at a Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency Subterranean Challenge competition in 2021.

Going Futher

Two years later, they are pushing the technology even further, earning new research grants to expand the technology and create new applications in the rapidly growing world of autonomous systems.

“Ideally you don’t want to put humans in harm’s way in disaster situations like mines or buildings after earthquakes; the walls or ceilings could collapse and maybe some already have,” said Sean Humbert, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Robotics Program at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��. “These robots can be disposable while still providing situational awareness.”

The team developed an advanced system of sensors and algorithms to allow the robots to function on their own – once given an assignment, they make decisions autonomously on how to best complete it.

Advanced Communication

A major goal is to get them from engineers directly into the hands of first responders. Success requires simplifying the way the robots transmit data into something approximating plain English, according to Kyle Harlow, a computer science PhD student.

“The robots communicate in pure math. We do a lot of work on top of that to interpret the data right now, but a firefighter doesn’t have that kind of time,” Harlow said.

To make that happen Humbert is collaborating with Chris Heckman, an associate professor of computer science, to change both how the robots communicate and how they represent the world. The robots’ eyes – a LiDAR sensor – creates highly detailed 3D maps of an environment, 15 cm at a time. That’s a problem when they try to relay information – the sheer amount of data clogs up the network.

“Humans don’t interpret the environment in 15 cm blocks,” Humbert said. “We’re now working on what’s called semantic mapping, which is a way to combine contextual and spatial information. This is closer to how the human brain represents the world and is much less memory intensive.”

High Tech Mapping

The team is also integrating new sensors to make the robots more effective in challenging environments. The robots excel in clear conditions but struggle with visual obstacles like dust, fog, and snow. Harlow is leading an effort to incorporate millimeter wave radar to change that.

“We have all these sensors that work well in the lab and in clean environments, but we need to be able to go out in places such as Colorado where it snows sometimes,” Harlow said.

Where some researchers are forced to suspend work when a grant ends, members of the subterranean robotics team keep finding new partners to push the technology further.

Autonomous Flight

Eric Frew, a professor of aerospace at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, is using the technology for a new National Institute of Standards and Technology competition to develop aerial robots – drones – instead of ground robots, to autonomously map disaster areas indoors and outside.

“Our entry is based directly on the Subterranean Challenge experience and the systems developed there,” Frew said.

Some teams in the competition will be relying on drones navigated by human operators, but Frew said ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� project is aiming for an autonomous solution that allows humans to focus on more critical tasks.

Although numerous universities and private businesses are advancing autonomous robotic systems, Humbert said other organizations often focus on individual aspects of the technology. The students and faculty at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� are working on all avenues of the systems and for uses in environments that present extreme challenges.

“We’ve built world-class platforms that incorporate mapping, localization, planning, coordination – all the high level stuff, the autonomy, that’s all us,” Humbert said. “There are only a handful of teams across the world that can do that. It’s a huge advantage that ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� has.”

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Designing flying AI systems to study supercell thunderstorms up close

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 21:40:14 +0000

Designing flying AI systems to study supercell thunderstorms up close Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/08/2021 - 14:40

Jeff Zehnder

Above: Members of the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� flight crew working on a RAAVEN drone in 2019 during a mission with a tornado in the distance.
Header: The RAAVEN drone flying near a storm system.

A team of University of Colorado Boulder scientists and engineers have landed a major grant to design next-generation uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) to fly into the heart of supercell thunderstorms that can spawn tornadoes.

“We’re trying to improve forecasts of severe weather,” said Eric Frew, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences. “There are things you can’t understand without flying into the storm from the air, things ground radar does not tell you.”

Frew’s team has earned a three-year, $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to get closer than ever before to the heart of supercell storms: by launching probes that can fly directly inside them.

“We’re flying drones at the edge of storms and are being successful, but we can’t pierce the heart of the storm with the drone because the winds and precipitation are too strong,” said Frew, who is the principal investigator of the grant.

The goal of the research is to develop a drone that can fly as close to a storm as possible and then deploy a series of helium balloon probes carrying sensor packages that will be sucked into the center of the storms at altitude and report back data on the conditions inside.

While UASs are often remote controlled by humans on the ground, the goal of this system is for it to work fully autonomously. The UAV will make its own decisions about how close it can safely get to a storm and when it should release the probes, using artificial intelligence to make choices based on quickly changing storm conditions faster than a team of people could.

Developing this type of system is a new frontier in artificial intelligence research. Assistant Professor Zachary Sunberg is a co-principal investigator on the grant; his expertise is in high-performance artificial intelligence algorithms for decision making under uncertain conditions.

“The storms that we plan to study are extremely difficult to model, so there is a lot of uncertainty,” Sunberg said. “My role will be to use artificial intelligence to optimize the aircraft's path to deploy the balloons in the places that they will gather the most information about the storm. It is one of the most exciting applications of my artificial intelligence work.”

These systems will eventually be deployed in the field during storm-chasing campaigns. Frew and colleagues at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� have made numerous multi-week excursions across the Great Plains following supercell storms and flying UAVs to gather data that can be analyzed by scientists to improve weather predictions and early warning systems for tornadoes.

“This has all been part of a 15-year vision of an autonomous airborne scientist. It used to be that being in the field was a barrier to communication. Now we have aircraft that have LTE and access to the internet, which opens us up to cloud computing. It makes for much more capable artificial intelligence,” Frew said. “The aircraft is just one part though. The science gathering is the aircraft, the team, the ground station computer, algorithms in cloud servers. We have the big brain of the internet at our disposal in ways we never did before.”

In addition to Frew and Sunberg, the research also includes Brian Argrow, professor of aerospace engineering sciences at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, and Adam Houston of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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NSF grants aim to improve security and safety of autonomous cars and systems

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 15:43:29 +0000

NSF grants aim to improve security and safety of autonomous cars and systems Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/30/2020 - 09:43

Researchers at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� are leading four new NSF-funded projects that are exploring the safety and security of autonomous systems, including those used in self-driving vehicles.

The work is part of an international effort to address the significant safety and security obstacles to widespread adoption of these systems in the very near future.

Assistant Professor Majid Zamani is leading several of these projects within the Department of Computer Science. He is also part of the Autonomous Systems Interdisciplinary Research Theme in the college. He said this cluster of projects all address safety and security but embrace and apply knowledge from different fields such as control theory, formal methods and machine learning.

“One of the projects looks at how to prevent outside intruders from gaining private information about autonomous systems through their sensor measurements,” Zamani said. “Another ensures the actual auto-pilot systems–the embedded control software–work safely as intended, both in calm and warm days in Arizona and in snowy weather in Michigan, by embracing ideas from transfer learning.”

Assistant Professor Ashutosh Trivedi is also heavily involved in the work, leading one of the projects that looks at machine learning techniques for creating foolproof safety systems. A member of the research theme as well, he said the answers that will come out of this kind of work over the next three years will have many applications for aerospace systems and more tangible aspects of everyday life.

“The safety and security of cyber-physical systems will eventually go well beyond the autonomous cars we are working with here,” Trivedi said. “These systems are the technological backbone of the increasingly interconnected and smart world where a design fault or security vulnerability can be catastrophic to the system, to the user or to those around them. This work has implications for wearable and implantable medical devices, smart infrastructure and connected communities, to name only a few areas.”

Here are the project details including staffing and funding totals:

Project Title: CPS: Medium: Correct-by-Construction Controller Synthesis using Gaussian Process Transfer Learning
Principal Investigator: Majid Zamani, Department of Computer Science
Co-Principal Investigators: Morteza Lahijanian and Eric Frew, Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences
Amount: $1,200,000
��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��: This project explores improvements to embedded control software for safety-critical cyber-physical systems in autonomous vehicles. Embedded control software forms the main core of autonomous systems wherein software components interact with physical systems such as traffic networks and power networks to name a few. These systems often have complex dynamics that are difficult to predict and ensure when it comes to safe operation. This project investigates a novel correct-by-construction controller synthesis scheme for these systems by embracing ideas from Gaussian processes. If successful, this could allow safety controllers developed for one type of autonomous vehicle to be transferred to another of a wholly new type – or for use in a new environment all together ¬– while still ensuring the original safety guarantee. This would save time on production and will be tested on underwater and aerial vehicles with an eye to future applications outside of self-driving cars.

Project Title: Secure-by-Construction Controller Synthesis for Cyber-Physical Systems
Principal Investigator: Majid Zamani, Department of Computer Science
Co-Principal Investigator: Ashutosh Trivedi, Department of Computer Science
Amount: $387,640
��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��: The security of autonomous vehicles from outside intruders is a new and growing area of research which has previously lagged behind more obvious safety concerns around the car’s actual operation. But because these vehicles collect and use a tremendous amount of personal data, they are appealing targets for hackers who can intrude through internet connected systems or other linked personal devices. From there they can deduce private internal information such as destination history or even potentially tamper with the vehicle. The proposed research aims to address this in parallel with the physical safety of the vehicle on the road. The ultimate goal is to develop algorithmic techniques and computational tools for constructing discrete controllers guaranteeing both safety and privacy properties, which are then automatically refined as hybrid controllers for the original systems. Doing would speed up overall development as security features would not have to be added on after the systems are already fully designed. This should also allow for more overlapping protection in both the physical and security arenas.

Project Title: SHF: Small: Omega-Regular Objectives for Model-Free Reinforcement Learning
Principal Investigator: Ashutosh Trivedi, Department of Computer Science
Co-Principal Investigator: Fabio Somenzi, Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering
Amount: $500,000
��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��: In reinforcement learning, software agents rely on and receive rewards that promote the achievement of given objectives or tasks. Scalar rewards can be used to reinforce the desired behavior, like keeping the car on the road and between the lines or withheld when drifting out of bounds. This machine learning technique has been demonstrated to be effective in many autonomous systems such as self-driving cars and manufacturing systems as well as other aspects of modern life such as social networks and internet connected devices. However, their integration into safety-critical settings for self-driving cars requires a new set of methods to ensure the decisions they ultimately make are the right ones. This project develops a rigorous approach to the design and verification of reinforcement learning-enabled systems that addresses issues of safety, efficiency, and scalability. This project also aims to develop an open source tool to create reinforcement learning algorithms to that end.

Project Title: An Entropy Approach to Invariance and Reachability of Uncertain Control Systems with Limited Information
Individual Principal Investigator: Majid Zamani, Department of Computer Science
Amount: $379,327
��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��: This project explores how autonomous vehicles can cope with limited bandwidth while interacting with cloud-based servers to share information and at the same time ensure their physical safety. Currently, communication systems, digital sensors, and microprocessors are being used by the car’s embedded control systems to respond to the needs and requests of external traffic network or the needs of the internal engine control for example. The interplay between those safety and reliability requirements – and the car’s ability to respect or enforce them – is key to keeping the vehicle safe on the road. While possible now, there is a finite amount of communication bandwidth available for maintaining that balance and the number of cars looking to use it is expected to go up over time. This research aims to establish the fundamental minimum data rates – or bandwidth – needed to make sure that the safety of the vehicles are not compromised. The results of this project will also enable the first step towards the efficient deployment of many innovative applications including underwater vehicles, sensor networks, and industrial control networks.

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Drones go underground in high-stakes competition

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 15:48:41 +0000

Drones go underground in high-stakes competition Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/06/2020 - 08:48

Roughly one story belowground, in an undisclosed location in Boulder County, close to a dozen engineers hustle up and down a series of utility tunnels—a network of corridors filled with pipes and lit only by sporadic lightbulbs.

The students and faculty members have come to this dim and dusty environment this morning to do something they can’t do aboveground: test out a fleet of autonomous vehicles, or drones. These robots, which are called “Huskies,” are several feet tall and look like what you might get if you crossed a radio-controlled car with a Humvee.

And they’ll soon become part of ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� efforts to achieve new feats of spelunking.

That’s because these engineers are contestants in the Subterranean Challenge, a high-stakes competition launched by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Over three years, teams of researchers from across the world will vie against each other to push their robotics knowledge to the limits—designing vehicles that can navigate underground environments just like this one.

Sean Humbert, a professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, leads the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� contingent, one of six funded teams in the challenge. This $4.5 million-dollar collaboration, dubbed Multi-agent Autonomy with Radar-Based Localization for Exploration (MARBLE), also includes engineers from CU Denver and the Massachusetts-based Scientific Systems Company, Inc.

Humbert hopes that the technology developed by his research group will one day lead to rolling or flying drones that can scour caves or collapsed subway tunnels around the world—and find the human survivors trapped inside.

But first, he and his colleagues will need to pass three grueling tests and a final event designed by DARPA.

They’ve already completed one test, a search-and-rescue operation that took place in an old coal mine in Pennsylvania. Their next trial takes place later this month and will bring the group to an abandoned research facility near Olympia, Washington.

“It was really impressive to see all of our outstanding students troubleshoot and solve problems real-time in the field,” Humbert said. “There will certainly be some ground-breaking science and engineering products that come out of this program, but I think the lasting contribution will be the next generation of field roboticists.”

A harsh world

Some of those field roboticists are gathering now in the utility tunnels.

The ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� team has set up an operations center of sorts in one corner of this area, complete with a folding table and several computer monitors.

“We’ve become pretty used to sitting in the dust,” said Michael Ohradzansky, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science.

Top: MARBLE team members ready a Husky robotic vehicle to enter Edgar mine; middle: The LIDAR system mounted on top of this Husky allows the robot to navigate underground; bottom: Michael Ohradzansky (pointing) and team members look on at the challenge arena during a search-and-rescue event in Pennsylvania (Credits: ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� College of Engineering and Applied Science, top and middle; DARPA, bottom)

He and his teammates type a series of commands into a computer, and a nearby Husky revs to life. It begins to roll down the connecting corridor, dodging the pipes that stick out at all angles. Soon, the robot disappears around a bend, leaving the space behind it dark.

“All this is testing autonomy,” said Christoffer Heckman, an assistant professor in computer science and a MARBLE team member.

Once the researchers press go, their robotic vehicles must be able to work together to perform their searches—all without the aid of a human operator.

That’s where things get tricky.

“Underground environments are very harsh,” Heckman said. “They don’t have very good lighting. They can be filled with gas and smoke. They can be very muddy or wet.”

Autonomous vehicles, in other words, face a different set of challenges deep underground than they would in a lab or even on city streets.

Take vision: To see in such environments, Heckman and his colleagues are designing robots that view their surroundings using three different types of sensors. They include a traditional camera, radar and a laser-based system called Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR).

Mapping is a big problem, too. The team’s drones, Heckman explained, won’t have access to GPS in the subterranean realm. That means they’ll have to enter a completely new environment, sketch out its twists and turns and even trade maps with other robots all on their own.

“When we go into a building, humans automatically develop a 3D map in their heads,” Heckman said. “That can tell you where stairs are, where elevator shafts are. Those are the kinds of features we want our autonomous vehicles to take away from an area.”

Taking flight

When the group traveled to the Pennsylvanian mine in August 2019, they faced an obstacle course of sorts.

Just before the event, DARPA hid a series of objects throughout that arena—life-sized dummies, red backpacks and cell phones. To score points, the MARBLE team released a fleet of Huskies into the mine, allowing the drones to seek out and pinpoint the location of those Easter eggs.

“Once we see an object, we can back-calculate its position relative to the starting gate,” said Michael Miles, a graduate student in computer science.

The group just missed out on placing in the top three finishers, Miles said, when one of their Huskies got stuck in about a foot of mud.

But he and his colleagues are raring to go for their next chance, which will kick off Feb. 18 in Washington State. The third challenge is slated for August 2020 and the final test a year after that.

This month, the researchers’ robots will have to explore several floors instead of one, forcing them to climb up stairs and scan lofty atria for lost dummies.

To enable them to do that, Miles and his team members have converted several of their Huskies into “aircraft carriers.” These robots will haul flying quadcopters deep into the competition arena, then launch those drones to explore where rolling vehicles can’t.

“I’m feeling pretty good about this challenge,” Miles said. “We’ll be working 70-hour weeks in the lead-up, but I think we learned a lot from last time.”

Fellow graduate student Ohradzansky added that the long days are worth it. He said that the project has given him and his team members a chance to do something that few university robotics researchers ever get to do—test their creations in the real, and very messy, world.

“Many researchers tend to stay in the realm of simulations, and everything works perfect in simulations,” he said. “What’s really different about this is we actually go out into the field, and that’s where you get a whole new level of challenge.”

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� MARBLE team members also include Eric Frew, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. CU Denver team members include Mark Golkowski, Ron Rorrer, Jae-Do Park and Vijay Harid.

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Solving AI’s (over)confidence problem

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 15:50:19 +0000

Solving AI’s (over)confidence problem Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/07/2020 - 08:50

Jeff Zehnder

Nisar Ahmed and Eric Frew

University of Colorado Boulder researchers are developing artificial intelligence systems so computers can recognize and explain their own limitations to users.

It takes on an important issue people face with each other every day.

“We all have different competencies and we know our own limitations. If I'm asked to complete a task, I generally know if I can do it. Machines aren't programmed like that,” said Nisar Ahmed, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Ahmed is serving as principal investigator at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� on a new, multi-university grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The $3.9 million grant, which is being led by the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and also includes the University of Texas at Austin, seeks to build “competency-aware machine learning”—essentially, machine learning systems that, when given a task, can tell you if they'll be able to do it and also explain why.

It is an area with broad and serious applications, according to Eric Frew, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� aerospace professor serving as a co-investigator on the project.

“Do you trust this drone to deliver a package of medicine, or do you take it in your own car, which will take three times as long to get there? If you're a soldier, do you trust a drone to go over a hill and search for an enemy? Will it be thorough enough?” Frew said.

Ahmed notes the engineers who design drones generally understand their every capability or lack thereof, but end-users naturally will not have the same level of knowledge. A drone that can tell you if it will likely be successful in completing a task should be more trustworthy to the operator.

The work is focused on unmanned aerial vehicles but has applications to ground robots and other AI systems.

“It's a combination of aerospace, computer science, and a little bit of psychology,” Ahmed said. “It's very interdisciplinary.”

The goal is not to pre-program drones with every possible mission or obstacle they could face, but rather develop a learning-based AI that has a base level of knowledge and can think abstractly in new situations and explain its decisions – just like people do.

“Humans are generally better than machines at adapting to unknowns, taking an unforeseen problem they have never faced before and comparing it to past events to find solutions. Machines haven't been programmed like that up to now,” Ahmed said.

Frew compares it to a situation understood by nearly all American adults - getting your driver's license.

“We don't test you on every possible circumstance you could face as a driver. We give you a driving test that covers a handful of situations and a knowledge test and then trust you with a license and that you can use reasoning behind the wheel,” Frew said.

Over the course of the grant, they will develop new competency-awareness assessment algorithms for AI systems, and then put them to the test using drones.

“We’re working on a problem that has mostly gone unnoticed in the computing, machine learning, and AI world, but gets at questions a lot of people have about trust. Will this robot do what I tell it to? Can it?” Ahmed said. “By developing systems that are aware that they have lots of answers, but don't have all the answers all the time and can tell us that, it should make them easier to use. I'm very excited about the possibilities.”

University of Colorado Boulder researchers are developing artificial intelligence systems so computers can recognize and explain their own limitations to users.

It takes on an important issue people face with each other every day.

“We all have different competencies and we know our own limitations. If I'm asked to...

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Students critical to massive drone study of tornadoes

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 23:57:30 +0000

Students critical to massive drone study of tornadoes Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/25/2019 - 17:57

Researchers from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� flew drones into severe storms this spring for project TORUS, one of the largest and most ambitious drone-based investigations of meteorological phenomena ever, with students leading much of the work.

Project TORUS—Targeted Observation by Radars and UAS of Supercells—is a partnership between ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (which is leading the work), Texas Tech University, the University of Oklahoma and the National Severe Storms Laboratory that will continue into 2020. The goal of the project is to collect data to improve the conceptual model of supercell thunderstorms—the parent storms of the most destructive tornadoes—to improve forecasting. According to Smead Aerospace Professor Eric Frew, a principal investigator on the project, better forecasting means more warning time and fewer false alarms, which could save lives in the future.

“What was really exciting about what we were able to accomplish was that these drones were designed, fielded and operated by students,” Frew said. “I had sophomores and juniors on this team accomplishing something that had never been done before.”

Funding for the project came from the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Support also came from the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Grand Challenge.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� portion of the project was led by faculty from the College of Engineering and Applied Science through the Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing initiative. The team was responsible for piloting up to three drones around the storms simultaneously to measure temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speeds. Drones are a critical component of the overall TORUS project because they sense data from inside the storm—data that cannot be obtained without physically being there to take the measurements. That information will be combined with remote sensing data obtained by the other collaborators collected around the same storm later.

In all, the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� team totaled over 40 hours of air time on 51 flights, including seven tornado-producing storms, over the nearly monthlong deployment throughout the Great Plains.

The university has been using drones for this type of work since 2010 and was the first in the world to do so. The lessons learned over the years informed the design of the new unmanned aircraft used this spring. Built from lightweight yet high-strength foam from RiteWing RC, the drones include an avionics system and many other aspects custombuilt by the team. They are also modular in design, allowing for fast and easy repairs in the field.

Aerospace engineering senior Danny Liebert pilots one of the drones for the team and said he loves how rugged it is compared to the previous “TTwistor” model.

“The TTwistor drone we used was great but just not as durable. These new aircraft are awesome. They take it like a champ out there,” he said. Frew said he can envision a future in which drones are used as forward deployment tools for weather prediction and data collection. Work on TORUS and future projects can make that a reality.

“We can see the technology advancing to a point where small towns or individuals have these drones and they release them into precursor environments to help feed into the weather forecasting system, much like the citizen scientists who report temperature and snow or water accumulations every day around the U.S.,” he said.

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Brainwaves Podcast - Natural disasters: How new science will help us survive

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 21:42:55 +0000

Brainwaves Podcast - Natural disasters: How new science will help us survive Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/07/2019 - 15:42

Tornadoes, floods, fires and more affect 160 million people per year worldwide. On this episode of the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Brainwaves podcast, what science is doing to help people and their property survive.

Interviews include Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center, Brian Argrow and Eric Frew with the TORUS Project and Michelle Meyer, a researcher looking at how men and women behave differently in natural disasters and are treated differently afterwards.

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Eric Frew News

The College Where Drones Are Everywhere

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Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest U.S. hail study in 40 years

Dark skies

Intrepid aircraft

Heart pounding

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���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ leading 10-university uncrewed aerial systems communications project

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Building next generation autonomous robots to serve humanity

Going Futher

Advanced Communication

High Tech Mapping

Autonomous Flight

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Designing flying AI systems to study supercell thunderstorms up close

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NSF grants aim to improve security and safety of autonomous cars and systems

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Drones go underground in high-stakes competition

A harsh world

Taking flight

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Solving AI’s (over)confidence problem

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Students critical to massive drone study of tornadoes

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Brainwaves Podcast - Natural disasters: How new science will help us survive

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� leading 10-university uncrewed aerial systems communications project