Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV)

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ establishes Colorado Space Policy Center

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:34:37 +0000

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ establishes Colorado Space Policy Center Jeff Zehnder Tue, 06/24/2025 - 14:34

The University of Colorado Boulder has established the Colorado Space Policy Center—positioning itself as a new resource on the forefront of an evolving landscape in national and global space exploration.

The center is designed for original research; discussion and debate on space policy issues; and educational programming. The work of the center will address advances in space science and technology, the role of government, the growth of commercial space, increases in global entrants and civilian-military interactions within the space sphere.

The center will seek to tie together entities within the university that involve space science, engineering, exploration, law and business in the aerospace context.

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s Research & Innovation Office, Office of the Provost, College of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering and Applied Science and Leeds School of Business represent key partners in the launch of the CSPC.

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Chasing hail: 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

Chasing hail: 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/��ý�Ļ��Ʒ)

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

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 ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ. “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 ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ 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 ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ. “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 ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ 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/��ý�Ļ��Ʒ)

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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Flying into hail storms for weather forecasting research

Jeff Zehnder — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:08:08 +0000

Flying into hail storms for weather forecasting research Jeff Zehnder Wed, 05/07/2025 - 08:08

This is an all out exploration of hail storms from the ground up. Our data from aloft will be combined with the data on the ground, which is also combined with radar trucks away from the storm. In the end, meteorologists will have a complete profile of the storm and its inner workings." - Brian Argrow

Follow the field campaign @CU Engineering on Instagram.

Hail Field Day

Sat., May 17, 2025. 2-4 p.m.

See all the scientific instruments deploying on the ICECHIP Campaign

Come See:

Doppler on wheels
Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles
Hail video and collection instruments
And more!

4820 63rd St., Suite 102
Boulder, CO 80301
(Next to Avery Brewing)

University of Colorado Boulder researchers are preparing to fan out across eastern Colorado and the Great Plains to study how hail storms form to improve weather forecasting.

Project ICECHIP (In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains) is a major, multi-university, international research initiative funded by the National Science Foundation.

This is the largest U.S.-based hail-focused field campaign in over 40 years.

What is happening?

Led by Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc., researchers from 15 colleges and universities, 3 international partners, and insurance industry representatives will deploy for six weeks to gather observations from a wide variety of hailstorms and hail types.

Coordinating with dozens of mobile sensor platforms, ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ will deploy uncrewed aircraft systems, including the RAAVEN fixed-wing drone, for hail-swath surveys.

This initiative will improve radar-based hail detection, hail models and forecasting, and weather warnings.

When is the field campaign happening?

May 15, 2025 - June 30, 2025

Who is involved?

Two teams of ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ researchers and students, led by:

Aerospace Engineering Sciences
- Distinguished Professor Brian Argrow
- Professor Eric Frew
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
- Professor Katja Friedrich

Full list of university, international, federal, and business partners

Where will the field research occur?

The campaign will cover Eastern Colorado and the 11 states that comprise the Great Plains, spanning from the Canadian Border to Odessa, TX.

Céu Gómez-Faulk in a RECUV radar vehicle during a previous tornado campaign.

RAAVEN fixed-wing drone in flight.

RAAVEN uncrewed aerial system in midflight.

University of Colorado Boulder researchers preparing to fan out across eastern Colorado and the Great Plains to study how hail storms form to improve weather fore...

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��ý�Ļ��Ʒ leading 10-university uncrewed aerial systems communications project

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

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ 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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��ý�Ļ��Ʒ will share atmospheric science tech, expertise through new grant

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 21:52:16 +0000

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ will share atmospheric science tech, expertise through new grant Jeff Zehnder Mon, 10/07/2024 - 15:52

Jeff Zehnder

Above: RAAVEN uncrewed aerial vehicle over the Atlantic Ocean.
Header Image: Meteorological map showing storms during a deployment.

Drone technology and atmospheric science instruments developed by the University of Colorado Boulder will be available to researchers nationwide through a new grant.

The National Science Foundation has awarded ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ a three-year, $1 million grant to establish a Community Instruments and Facilities program titled Mobile Uncrewed Systems for Atmospheric Science (MUSAS).

“We have a track record for atmospheric research with the equipment we’ve created and the campaigns we’ve partnered in. Whenever atmospheric scientists need to collect data in environments they can’t get other ways, that’s where we come in,” said Brian Argrow, principal investigator for the grant.

Argrow, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is a nationally recognized expert in uncrewed aerial systems. He and ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ colleagues have spent decades developing fixed-wing and quad-copter-style drone systems to study weather and other atmospheric conditions.

Their work has spanned the globe, including in extreme conditions like the North Pole and several campaigns in the United States to analyze supercell thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes.

The new grant will provide the larger scientific community access to ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s instrumentation and know-how.

“We’re bringing aerospace to the atmospheric sciences community,” Argrow said. “We have the expertise, the drones, the deployment systems, and regulatory approval to fly in the national airspace system.”

Although the program does not officially begin until Nov. 1, Argrow said they have already been contacted by a university with a partnership proposal.

Inspecting a RAAVEN drone while on deployment.

“By increasing access to small uncrewed aerial systems, we’ll increase the amount of data available to the broader community to help solve some of the toughest problems in atmospheric science. Our technology can sample the physics and chemistry of the lower atmosphere and offer new perspectives on this environment,” Argrow said.

MUSAS joins a network of NSF-supported initiatives across the country that allow universities to share research equipment and expertise.

Through the program, partners will have access to ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s personnel as well as the RAAVEN and Super RAAVEN fixed-wing drones and the CopterSonde 3 quad-copter, along with deployment and tracking vehicles.

Argrow anticipates an array of research to come from the partnerships, including into boundary layer processes, coastal circulations, aerosol processes, turbulence and turbulent fluxes, surface-atmosphere exchange, high-latitude environments, and severe weather.

“Building on the initial investment from the CU Grand Challenge Initiative, we have assembled infrastructure which is unique,” Argrow said. “��ý�Ļ��Ʒ has extensive experience operating and developing these systems, and this gives us the opportunity to expand our impact.”

Drone technology and atmospheric science instruments developed by ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ will be available to researchers nationwide through a new grant. The National Science Foundation has...

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Professor earns two major grants to advance AI for autonomous systems

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 14:24:05 +0000

Professor earns two major grants to advance AI for autonomous systems Jeff Zehnder Tue, 09/03/2024 - 08:24

Jeff Zehnder

Zach Sunberg

Zach Sunberg’s research developing better artificial intelligence systems is getting a major boost from two federal grant awards.

Sunberg is receiving a $599,000, five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and is a partner on a related $4 million multi-university initiative from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Both projects focus on advancing game theory algorithms so AI systems can better solve problems in real-time in the field.

“I’m excited to receive the recognition that I’m looking at important problems to solve in both of these areas,” Sunberg said. “ONR shows the relevance for defense applications, and the NSF award focuses on making our nation and our world a better place.”

Sunberg is an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on autonomous systems and AI, with an emphasis on game theory.

Although game theory has origins in solving tabletop board games and card games, it is a broad field of research that studies problem-solving in complex, real-world situations.

“You might think of a game as a board game, but any situation where multiple agents are interacting and have their own goals can be mathematically represented as a game. Poker has clear rules, but so does driving a car; there are just a lot more variables,” Sunberg said.

AI systems like those used in self-driving cars typically rely on offline reinforcement learning. In such a system, automakers use historical data collected from a fleet of vehicles to optimize an algorithm to react to future situations. Sunberg is seeking to develop online decision-making systems, where an AI can think in real time to interact with situations that do not match historical data.

“This has previously been considered a computationally intractable problem” Sunberg said. “But our lab recently had a breakthrough with single-agent planning where we proved we did not need a lot of computation even in a large state space. What we want to do next is work on more complex multi-agent situations.”

The research focuses on a framework used by scientists and engineers to model possible outcomes when full data is not available, called partially observable Markov stochastic games.

“An application is airborne collision avoidance. In the past, the other pilot’s actions would be modeled as a probability distribution. That wasn’t satisfying to me. The other pilot is a decision maker themselves, so it would be better to model as a multi-agent game, but we don’t know how to solve partially observable games like that using online systems,” Sunberg said.

The research from the NSF grant has applications across an array of autonomous systems, from search and rescue robots, to self-driving cars, to how satellites navigate while orbiting the Earth. The Navy award is focused more on AI deception and counter deception in the military realm.

“An enemy is going to try to deceive you in some way, so we want to focus on how that can happen and how do we make AI resistant to it. We’re also looking at developing AI that can deceive an adversary. If you have a drone that you want to avoid enemy air defenses, how can it use bluffing to help it do that,” Sunberg said.

The ONR award is brings together four universities. The project is being led by the Georgia Institute of Technology with partners at the University of California Santa Barbara, ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ, and the University of Texas at Austin. Sunberg’s portion of the $4 million grant is worth roughly $1 million.

“The current most widely used methods for AIs, these offline systems, are really a function approximater. It’s kind of an intuitive reaction or instinct. We want an AI that can go further, like people, and think and deliberate about a situation. There’s huge potential with this work,” he said.

Zach Sunberg’s research developing better artificial intelligence systems is getting a major boost from two federal grant awards. Sunberg is receiving a...

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Blockbuster science: Storm-chasing drone appears in ‘Twisters’

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 18:58:46 +0000

Blockbuster science: Storm-chasing drone appears in ‘Twisters’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/18/2024 - 12:58

A storm-chasing drone operated by researchers at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ got the blockbuster treatment when a version inspired by it appeared in the summer popcorn flick “Twisters.”

The RAAVEN drone was developed by researchers at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) program. It’s part of the Targeted Observation by Radars and UAS of Supercells (TORUS) project, a research effort that uses small drones and remote-sensing instruments to collect data on tornado formation in supercell thunderstorms. TORUS is led by principal investigator Adam Houston of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Brian Argrow and Eric Frew, professors in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ, are among the co-principal investigators for the project.

In trailer scenes for “Twisters,” an uncrewed aircraft that matches RAAVEN swoops like a fighter jet toward storm clouds.

The RAAVEN’s appearance in the trailer surprised and delighted Argrow, its lead developer, when he first viewed it during the Super Bowl halftime this past February.

Argrow said he didn’t realize a blockbuster like “Twisters” was underway when a film crew contacted him in April 2023 for permission to create a radio-controlled model of the RAAVEN. He directed the moviemakers to make arrangements with the drone’s airframe manufacturer.

“I don’t usually watch the halftime show, so I was about to go downstairs when the trailer came on,” he recounted. “I was shocked. This really is a big movie! And as I was watching, the RAAVEN appears. I said to my wife: ‘Did you see that? That’s a RAAVEN!’”

However, the RAAVEN already is a star.

Since 2017, the 6-and-a-half-foot wingspan drone has played a leading role in TORUS, which combines drones and tracking vehicles to gather thunderstorm data. TORUS explores how supercell thunderstorms give rise to tornadoes, and the researchers hope to help improve tornado warnings across the country. The project also involves the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, the University of Oklahoma's Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations and Texas Tech University.

The RAAVEN can fly as fast as 90 miles per hour and has a battery life of up to three hours, putting it ahead of standard rotary wing drones, which can’t keep up with storms moving at 30 to 60 miles per hour and often run short of battery life, Argrow said.

“No one else is doing what we do,” he said, adding that it’s the RAAVEN and its mobile ground stations, authorized by the FAA, that make the research unique.

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Designing autonomous robots for use on Mars and closer to home

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 14:54:08 +0000

Designing autonomous robots for use on Mars and closer to home Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/15/2024 - 08:54

Jeff Zehnder

Preparing to engage the robot during the MDRS mission.

Pawel Sawicki (BioMedEngr MS’22, AeroEngr PhD’23) is exploring the barren landscape of Mars and testing out critical new technologies through a one-of-a-kind experience here on Earth.

Welcome to the Mars Desert Research Station, an “analog” astronaut research facility in the remote Utah desert. Operated by the Mars Society, the center gives scientists and engineers the opportunity to test out future space experiments without a long space journey.

Sawicki, a University of Colorado Boulder master’s and PhD alumnus, recently returned from the base, where he spent two weeks as a mission commander with a six-member crew. The team lived and worked under conditions remarkably similar to what NASA astronauts will face on the red planet.

“It was pretty exciting. We lived in the station and to go outside we had to wear EVA suits,” Sawicki said. “We’re simulating life on Mars so we can learn how to design experiments, equipment, and operations for when astronauts really go and face that challenge.”

Along with a series of geological and nuclear experiments was a 30 lb., four-wheel, ground robot provided by Nisar Ahmed, an associate professor of aerospace at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Robots will be important on future Mars missions, but only if users can easily understand their capabilities and limitations, said Nick Conlon, one of Ahmed’s PhD students in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.

Ahmed’s lab is focused on developing methods so a robot can accurately tell operators how well it will be able to do a task. Called Factorized Machine Self-Confidence, the system will give users an easy way to grasp how competent the robot is.

“The objective was to use the robot to take video autonomously in different areas to create a 360 view of the environment, like Google Maps Street View,” Conlon said. “Before the robot starts as task, it analyzes its internal models to report if it can achieve the goal. Can it drive to a certain area, does it have enough battery to get back, can it avoid obstacles? Things like that.”

Conlon delivered the robot to MDRS and demonstrated the technology prior to the analog mission beginning.

While astronauts are likely to be highly trained on their equipment, the goal of this robotics research is to make it possible for regular users to utilize the technology with little trouble.

“People have different ideas of what a robot might be capable of,” Conlon said. “We don’t want them to over trust a piece of equipment and break it or get hurt or drive off a cliff. We also don’t want people to under trust and have it sit and collect dust in a corner. We want people to use it within its limits and want to use it.”

Conlon said much of the research with the robot thus far has been in controlled environments, making Sawicki’s MDRS mission a unique deployment opportunity.

“We’ll be writing a paper from all we’ve learned from this experience,” Sawicki said. “One of the key findings is just how to make the system super robust for a field study, taking it on an EVA, and wearing a spacesuit in the process.”

Although there were some early diagnostic issues, the robot was able to complete all of the requested site surveys, and both Conlon and Sawicki are hopeful the data will be helpful for subsequent MDRS missions.

One unique challenge that will face future Mars astronauts is communicating with home. Due to the massive distance between the red planet and Earth, one way transmissions have a minimum delay of 8-10 minutes. That makes any live calls impossible. The same restrictions are imposed on the analogue astronauts.

“The isolation was definitely a mental challenge. Nick was back in Colorado and when I had to work with him on an issue with the robot, there are no phone calls and you can’t exchange messages quickly. You send an email and wait,” Sawicki said.

Participating in an MDRS mission fulfilled a goal Sawicki had held since his time as a grad student. ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ offers a course called Medicine in Space and Surface Environments that takes students to MDRS, but during his PhD program Sawicki was unable to make it work with his schedule.

He reached out to MDRS after graduating to sign up for a mission on his own and they offered the opportunity to be mission commander.

“My PhD was in hypersonics but I had taken all of these bioastronautics classes and they said you’re a great fit for this mission,” Sawicki said. “I learned the trials and tribulations of what goes into an isolated mission like this, maintaining crew stability, scheduling. It was a great learning experience for me, and a unique opportunity for Ahmed and Conlon to learn about how future astronauts may one day work with, and alongside, autonomous robots.”

The MDRS 297 mission patch, with the team member names and the robot in lower left.

Pawel Sawicki is exploring the barren landscape of Mars and testing out critical new technologies through a one-of-a-kind experience here on Earth. Welcome to the Mars Desert Research Station, an...

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Atmospheric research in the most extreme place on Earth: Antarctica

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 15:10:10 +0000

Atmospheric research in the most extreme place on Earth: Antarctica Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/24/2024 - 09:10

Jeff Zehnder

Above: Doddi aboard the Shirase amid the Antarctic icepack.
Header Video: Adelie penguins traveling across the frozen tundra.

Abhi Doddi (PhDAeroEngr’21) is collecting scientific data outdoors in a 70 mph whiteout blizzard. It is just another day of life in Antarctica.

Doddi, a postdoctoral researcher in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, is leading a major study involving high-altitude balloons to improve weather forecasting on the Antarctic continent.

He endured years of planning and an ocean voyage aboard an icebreaker ship to reach this remote and dangerous corner of the Earth, and despite the weather, he is excited to be here.

“This sort of data has never been collected before,” Doddi said. “We want to gather small-scale turbulence data over the polar vortex using complimentary observations from radar and balloon-based instruments. This data is very important to improve the representation of turbulence due to the atmospheric gravity waves and the polar jet stream in the current numerical weather prediction models.”

Ship Journey

Most U.S.-based researchers who study the Antarctic weather do so from McMurdo Station, a United States-run base that is surprisingly accessible, with daily flights aboard military cargo planes during the Antarctic summer.

Doddi’s research required a much more arduous journey. He needed access to a specialized mesosphere–stratosphere–troposphere (MST) radar, and there is just one on the continent – at Syowa Station, a Japanese base only accessible by ship. Japan’s naval icebreaker Shirase makes one trip there each year. Doddi boarded in Australia. From there, it took 20 days to reach Syowa and 38 to return.

“I don’t get seasick, but it gets uncomfortable when swells are 7-8 meters tall, and you’re being tossed in all directions, even while you sleep,” Doddi said.

Breaking the Ice

The ship could travel at 30 knots on the open ocean, but when they reached the Antarctic ice pack, travel slowed considerably as the vessel needed to repeatedly back up and accelerate forward to break through the ice.

The Shirase carried roughly 180 crew plus 100 scientists and engineers. Doddi and his research partner, Tyler Mixa (MAeroEngr’14, PhD’19), were the first non-Japanese researchers to visit Syowa station.

Timelapse video of the Shirase reversing and accelerating forward to break through the Antarctic icepack.

“The language barrier was the hardest thing. Of the entire crew, there were only about 10 people who spoke conversational English,” Doddi said.

With no option for quick departure in the event of a medical emergency, every person on the trip needed to be in perfect health.

“They want you to be bulletproof. If you get a cavity before the trip, until your dentist provides proof that it’s been filled, and your doctor has signed off on your health, and the Japanese medical team has reviewed the records, you’re not getting on the ship,” he said.

Research Variety

Doddi’s work focused on Antarctic atmospheric conditions, but there were a litany of other teams conducting studies across scientific disciplines. There were multiple oceanographers and aquatic life experts, as well as people doing bird studies, ice core samples, and geological surveys.

“One of the teams discovered 3-4 new species of microorganisms on the trip, which was fascinating. No one had ever laid eyes on those organisms before,” he said.

Even after reaching Antarctica, there was more travel – by air. Due to shallow water, the Shirase must anchor 10 miles off shore and ferry the crew and supplies to the base via helicopter.

Blizzard Balloon Launches

Once they landed at Syowa, Doddi’s research got underway in earnest – readying dozens of balloon payloads that would fly to 20 km in altitude while drifting up to 100 km laterally and relay turbulence measurements back in real time.

The work paired broad measurements from the MST radar with precision instruments aboard the balloon-borne instrument systems developed at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ. As a major goal is improving weather forecasting, Doddi spent plenty of time outdoors in less-than-ideal weather.

“We experienced three different blizzards, each lasting up to three days, with winds in excess of 60-70 mph,” he said. “Those conditions were hands down some of the best experiences of my life. That’s the data we want, even if it meant we were staying up for 48 hours. My sleep cycle was totally messed up,” he said.

It did not help that during the Antarctic summer, the sun never sets.

When it was not snowing, the temperature typically hovered just below freezing – practically balmy for an Antarctic summer – with the warmest days topping out at 5°C (41°F).

Abhi Doddi and Tyler Mixa launching a balloon payload on a very windy day at Syowa Station

Syowa Station, which is spread across 60 buildings, offered few comforts during down time.

“The bunks on the ship were larger and more comfortable than those on the base. It was four people to a room, with no doors on any room, just curtains, and communal baths, like a gym locker room,” Doddi said.

What's a Vegetarian?

He also faced a unique obstacle with food. Doddi is a life-long vegetarian, but base meals were via a single Navy cafeteria cooking everyone the same food.

“I’m a vegetarian from birth, and the concept of vegetarianism doesn’t exist in Japanese culture. They don’t even have a word for it. So I brought 240 shelf-stable meals as part of my personal supplies,” he said.

Although Antarctica is frozen year round, there is still plenty of local wildlife. Doddi saw hundreds of emperor penguins and over 1,000 adelie penguins, in addition to seals, petrel seabirds, and albatross. He was able to do some hiking, but safety precautions were necessary.

“If you were going beyond the perimeter of the base or to access a restricted portion, one of the Navy personnel had to go ahead of you to assess the conditions of the ice for cracks and crevasses,” he said.

Analysis Back Home

With the Antarctic field campaign complete and Doddi back in Colorado, phase two of the project begins – complex and lengthy analysis.

“This was a two-month data collection project followed by a three-year modeling program,” Doddi said. “We need massive super computers to do this modeling. The overarching goal is to provide guidance to improve the weather forecasts for people in Antarctica, so this will help researchers for years to come.”

In addition to Doddi, collaborators on the project are Dale Lawrence, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ and director of the Research & Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles; Mixa from Global Atmospheric Technologies and Sciences (GATS) in Boulder; the National Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo; and Kyoto University.

Map of the Shirase's 20 day journey from Australia, to Syowa Station.
On the 38 day trip back, the ship hugged the Antarctic coast for additional research and to stop at an automated ionospheric measuring station that needed service.

Abhi Doddi (PhDAeroEngr’21) is collecting scientific data outdoors in a 70 mph whiteout blizzard. It is just another day of life in Antarctica. Doddi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, is leading a major study involving high-altitude balloons to improve weather forecasting on the Antarctic continent.

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Testing AI-enabled drones for search and rescue

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 19:38:44 +0000

Testing AI-enabled drones for search and rescue Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/14/2024 - 13:38

The University of Colorado Aerospace Engineering department is partnering with the Boulder Emergency Squad to evaluate the use of AI-enabled drones in search and rescue operations. The research allows rescuers to feed information to drones, which can then independently help teams scout locations or find individuals.

"What we're doing with this research is giving tools to rescuers to control drones to get that initial perspective and then allowing them to also do other things at the same time," said Hunter Ray, a doctoral student at Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ.

Ray and first responders explain what the drones are capable of, what they work on during field tests and how they hope to implement the drones in the future. The project is still in the development phase.

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Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV)

����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ establishes Colorado Space Policy Center

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Chasing hail: 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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Flying into hail storms for weather forecasting research

Hail Field Day

What is happening?

When is the field campaign happening?

Who is involved?

Where will the field research occur?

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����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ leading 10-university uncrewed aerial systems communications project

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����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ will share atmospheric science tech, expertise through new grant

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Professor earns two major grants to advance AI for autonomous systems

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Blockbuster science: Storm-chasing drone appears in ‘Twisters’

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Designing autonomous robots for use on Mars and closer to home

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Atmospheric research in the most extreme place on Earth: Antarctica

Ship Journey

Breaking the Ice

Research Variety

Blizzard Balloon Launches

What's a Vegetarian?

Analysis Back Home

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Testing AI-enabled drones for search and rescue

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��ý�Ļ��Ʒ establishes Colorado Space Policy Center

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ leading 10-university uncrewed aerial systems communications project

��ý�Ļ��Ʒ will share atmospheric science tech, expertise through new grant