News

Spring 2025

• Dr. Faruque gave an invited seminar while visiting Oregon State University, supporting the FAA ASSURE Center of Excellence

• We presented work on optical vs collision-based measurement of space debris and methods for discovering the interaction rules in insects at AIAA SciTech 2025

Fall 2024

• Saiful Islam defended his PhD, graduated, and moved on to his new role with Harvard's Rowland Institute 

• Team members spent much of October in the Czech Republic working with the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety and colleagues at the Czech Technical University and Charles University, presenting 3 papers at the 13th annual Space Safety Conference

• Our swarm detection and alternative biological swarming architecture discoveries were highlighted at the ONR Science of Autonomy Review

Spring 2024

• Our group led a team to a 3rd place (out of 25 teams) in the MITLL/AIAA Kerbal Space Program Differential Games Challenge.  

• Our group shared five papers at AIAA SciTech 2024 Forum, covering

  • System identification of insects in groups through two cross-correlation and direct Laplacian methods

  • Work from our NASA University Leadership Initiative WINDMAP through an overview, UAV's entrained in vortices, and recursive forms for multi-agent wind field estimation

Fall 2023

• Our group shared our orbital debris cleanup work at the AIAA ASCEND conference, the overall mission and the best companion satellite placement

• Arif Billah defended his PhD disssertation on "Engineering unmanned aerial robotic collective motions via the science of visually-guided insect swarming."

 Fall 2022:

• US Space Force selected our project on orbital debris cleanup.

• Five of our papers were accepted to AIAA SciTech 2023 Forum. 

  1. Billah: Implicit information transfer via streaker bees in a bio-inspired visual feedback swarm framework

  2. Griffith: System identification of pneumatic dynamics for active flow aircraft

  3. Islam: Model reference adaptive control of experimentally identified honeybee visual tracking dynamics

  4. Patel: Seascape – simple educational autopilot system with c++ architecture & python exterior

  5. Mansy: Tornado localization and structure identification from uav wind measurements

Summer 2022

• August: We presented results and appeared as a panelist at the UAS Weather Technology Forum and also at the ONR Science of Autonomy Review in Arlington, VA.   Patrick Williams, William Karika, and Nafis Nayeem joined our group as graduate research assistants.

• July: Ishriak Ahmed presented Decentralized multi-agent navigation via knee-based multi-objective optimization of potential functions at IFAC ICONS.

• June: Prof Faruque gave an invited seminar at UC Boulder on Aerospace Flight Control approaches to Active Flow Configurations, Visual Swarming, and Tornado Physics Identification.

Spring 2022

• We hosted Prof Rolf Mueller from Virginia Tech for a seminar on bat sonar and discussion on how it connects to insect swarming

• Ishriak Ahmed's paper on how laboratory enclosures affect swarming honeybees is now available at Bioinspiration & Biomimetics

• Brandon White's paper on real-time tornado measurements is now published at Atmospheric Measurement Technologies 

• Arif Billah's Modeling Small-Target Motion Detector Neurons As Switched Systems with Dwell Time Constraints was accepted for the June American Control Conference

• Ishriak Ahmed's work on genetic-algorithms for swarming was accepted to the July IFAC ICONS conference

• We hosted Patrick Hyun for a seminar on Autonomous Control of Extreme Behaviors in Bio-Inspired Robotics, Daero Lee for a seminar on Spacecraft Attitude Estimation and Control Systems  During Close-proximity Operations, and Atanu Halder on Aeromechanics of Cycloidal Rotors

• We moved into our new offices on north campus

Fall 2021

August: Our research was highlighted in the ONR Science of Autonomy Review

September: Atmospheric Measurement Technologies has made a tornadic infrasound preprint available for public discussion 

November: We hosted NRL's Aaron Kahn to discuss "minimum complexity autopilots"

December: Christian Coletti defended his MS thesis on active flow control--welcome to our PhD program, Christian!

July: MS defense

Congratulations to Ishriak Ahmed on his successful masters defense!  His defense was on "Multi-insect Visual Tracking and System Identification Techniques for Inflight Feedback Interaction Analysis."  Welcome to our PhD program, Ishriak!

June: Seminars and MS defense

Our research was highlighted in the ONR Bio-Inspired Autonomous Systems Review

Congratulations to Brandon White on his successful masters defense! His defense was on "Measurement and Magnitude Based System Identification of Tornado-Associated Infrasound."

March: Best paper award and IEEE INERTIAL

Congratulations to Brandon White on his "best paper award" in the MS category at AIAA Regional Student Paper Competition for his paper "Preliminary Adaptation of Speech Source Localization Algorithm for Reduced Bandwidth of Interest in Tornadic Infrasound Signals."

Ujjval Patel presented "Sensor fusion to improve state estimate accuracy using multiple inertial measurement units" at IEEE International Symposium on Inertial Sensors and Systems (INERTIAL).

January: SICB and AIAA SciTech

Ethan Lane presented in the "best paper award" session on at AIAA SciTech Forum on "Insect in-flight kinematic adjustments during ethanol exposure."

Ishriak Ahmed presented “A high speed visual tracking system for analyzing in-flight insect interactions” at Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology's annual meeting.

Arif Billah presented “A model for multi-agent group motion inspired by insect visuomotor feedback” at Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology's annual meeting.

Brandon White presented “Preliminary Severe Storm Data from a Mobile Infrasound System,” at AIAA SciTech Forum.

Shady Ahmed presented “Nonlinear Filtering for Simultaneous State Correction and Eddy Viscosity Estimation in Computational Fluid Dynamics,” at AIAA SciTech Forum.

December:  ASA meeting

Brandon White presented “Infrasound measurement of tornadoes and other severe storm events at close range,” in 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Summer seminars

August: Our research was highlighted in the ONR Science of Autonomy Review

June: Our research was highlighted in the ONR Bio-Inspired Autonomous Systems Review

May Storm season

Our infrasound team's new equipment was shared on Ch9 news 

April 2020 Awards

Our OSU-led team was selected for a NASA University Leadership Initiative studying Real-time Weather Awareness for Enhanced Safety Assurance in UTM.

Tim Runnels' paper received a 3rd place award at the AIAA Region IV Student Conference.

Ethan Lane’s paper received the conference's 1st place award.  Ethan will advance to present his paper at the AIAA 2021 SciTech Forum.

March AIAA Student Conference

2 of our students are presenting papers at the AIAA Region IV Student Conference March 27-28, 2020

February 2020 Graduate research symposium

5 of our graduate students are presenting at the 2020 MAE Graduate Research Symposium on February 28, 2020. Ishriak Ahmed, Christian Coletti, Arif Billah, Saiful Islam, and Ujjval Patel

Summer 2019 Seminars:

Prof Faruque gave invited seminars as a keynote speaker at InfoAg Conference in St Louis and at Technical University of Munich's Flight Systems Dynamics Institute in July 2019.

New building (Nov 2019):

Grand opening for our new Excelsior building.