Publication Date
2017
Document Type
Dissertation
Committee Members
John Gallagher (Advisor), Michael Raymer (Committee Member), Mateen Rizki (Committee Member), Joseph Slater (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Abstract
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized by closely coupled physical and software components that operate simultaneously on different spatial and temporal scales; exhibit multiple and distinct behavioral modalities; and interact with one another in ways not entirely predictable at the time of design. A commonly appearing type of CPS are systems that contain one or more smart components that adapt locally in response to global measurements of whole system performance. An example of a smart component robotic CPS system is a Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FW-MAV) that contains wing motion oscillators that control their wing flapping patterns to enable the whole system to fly precisely after the wings are damaged in unpredictable ways. Localized learning of wing flapping patterns using meta-heuristic search optimizing flight precision has been shown effective in recovering flight precision after wing damage. However, such methods provide no insight into the nature of the damage that necessitated the learning. Additionally, if the learning is done while the FW-MAV is in service, it is possible for the search algorithm to actually damage the wings even more due to overly aggressive testing of candidate solutions. In previous work, a method was developed to extract estimates of wing damage as a side effect of the corrective learning of wing motion patterns. Although effective, that method lacked in two important respects. First, it did not settle on wing gait solutions quickly enough for the damage estimates to be created in a time acceptable to a user. Second, there were no protections against testing excessively aggressive wing motions that could potentially damage the system even further during the attempted behavior level repair. This work addresses both of those issues by making modifications to the representation and search space of wing motion patterns potentially visited by the online metaheuristic search. The overarching goals were to lessen the time to required to achieve effective repair and damage estimates and to avoid further damage to wings by limiting the search's access to overly aggressive wing motions. The key challenge was understanding how to modify representations and search space to provide the desired benefits without destroying the method's ability to find solutions at all. With the recent emergence of functional insect-sized and bird-sized FW-MAV and an expected need to modify wing behavior in service, this study, believed to be the first of its kind, is of contemporary relevance.
Page Count
87
Department or Program
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Year Degree Awarded
2017
Copyright
Copyright 2017, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may not be modified. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
