Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Joshua Vaughan

Submitted by Megan Bergeron

Dr. Joshua Vaughan obtained two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Hampden-Sydney College. Dr. Vaughan received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech and continued there to receive his Ph.D. Dr. Vaughan served as a postdoc for a short time at Georgia Tech, then spent one year at Tokyo Institute of Technology as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellow.

Dr. Vaughan’s research includes a variety of controls and robotics related work, including vibration control, input shaping, crane control, human-machine interfaces, autonomous vehicles, and robots for inspection, rescue, and manufacturing.

Dr. Vaughan is working on a broad range of projects, a number of which are based around the theme of utilizing flexibility and vibration as a design advantage. In one project under this theme, Dr. Vaughan and his research team are seeking to promote a design process that considers all part of the system’s dynamics, including the control system and the command-generation method, during the mechanical design process. Allowing flexibility during this process, his team can design systems that are lighter and more energy efficient, while having higher performance.

Another of his projects fitting under this main theme is the utilization of flexibility in walking, running, and jumping robots. If one were to allow flexibility in the robot legs, then one can actually begin to move around the environment in a manner closer to most biological organisms. For example, humans utilize muscles as both springs and actuators, particularly when running or jumping. Currently, few robots work this way. Dr. Vaughan and his research team are hoping to change that by both developing generalized design procedures for flexible-legged robots and improving the control of them.

In another project, Dr. Vaughan is working to automatically generate maps of crane workspaces using a machine vision system. The goal is to provide obstacle information to the crane operator (The vast majority of cranes are still human operated, and will be for the foreseeable future.) and perhaps prohibit the user from colliding with known obstacles in the workspace.

Specifically, Dr. Vaughan is working with Swiftships LLC, a Morgan City-based shipbuilder, to develop an autonomous control architecture for their boats through a project entitled, “Making the Anaconda Autonomous.” The work is currently focused on the Anaconda, a high-performance boat designed for riverine operations. The goal is to help them establish the foundation of a future product line, while advancing the state-of-the-art in autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) modeling and control. The unique qualities of the Anaconda—it’s both faster and more agile than most existing ASVs—provide an opportunity to do this.

Another project, entitled “Reducing Oscillation of Ship-Mounted Cranes Used for ASV Retrieval” and funded by the Board of Regents’ Support Fund Industrial Ties for Research Subprogram, partners with C & C Technologies, a leader in the hydrographic surveying industry whose customers include the oil and gas industry, the telecommunications industry, and the U.S. government. One primary surveying tool of C & C Technologies is the Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV). ASVs are often launched and retrieved from larger ocean-going vessels using a crane-based system. However, both the efficiency and safety of the launch-and-retrieval system are limited by the oscillation induced by a combination of the crane’s intended motion and disturbances resulting from ocean and weather conditions.

The primary objective of this project is the advancement of crane-control techniques to include the reduction of oscillation resulting from the large disturbances common to the ship-mounted ASV launch-and-retrieval system. This will enable safer and more efficient ASV operations. Broader impacts of this work include improvements to many shipboard crane operations, where large amplitude external disturbances are common, and reduced Health, Safety, and Environmental (HSE) exposure from cranes mounted on drilling and oil-production platforms, where cranes are used to load and unload equipment and supplies.

Dr. Vaughan is working on another project, entitled “Using Robotics to Improve Efficiency of Operations at Professional Arts Pharmacy,” funded by Professional Arts Pharmacy. The goal of this project is to develop a robot to automate the evacuation of a large number of tubes, similar in size and shape to traditional toothpaste tubes. The industrial partner, Professional Arts Pharmacy, receives shipments of 10,000 tubes every two weeks. Each tube is individually packaged, and its contents must be evacuated for use. This process is currently done entirely by hand, with workers processing 1,000 tubes per day on average. Automating this process will help Professional Arts Pharmacy improve its operational efficiency.

Lastly, Dr. Vaughan is working on a project entitled, “Establishing ARLISS at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,” funded by Louisiana Space Grant (LaSPACE). ARLISS, A Rocket Launch for International Student Satellites, is an initiative to provide students with hands-on experience in the design, construction, and launch of space systems. ARLISS is held on the Black Rock Playa (a dry lake bed) in Nevada every September, when the members of the AERO-PAC rocket club provide rockets to launch the student satellites. The student projects are not actually launched into space, but rather to approximately 12,000 feet. From this height, the student-designed systems must autonomously navigate to a predetermined target location. In addition to providing students with an opportunity to compete in an interesting event, this project also serves as an additional test scenario for the mobile robot and autonomous navigation research in Dr. Vaughan’s lab.

Most of Dr. Vaughan’s research is controls focused. The idea that we can take a system that naturally behaves in a certain way, and through our knowledge of the system, modify that behavior is still very interesting. Dr. Vaughan feels lucky that controls is one area where he is able to work with researchers from many other fields. He is a mechanical engineer, but nearly every department of engineering has controls-related researchers. Furthermore, there are huge number of projects that have a controls component, with applications across a huge range of disciplines, from biomedical to aerospace to materials science to nanotechnology. The variety of this work not only allows him and his research group to work with some incredibly smart people, but it also provides a plethora of interesting examples for him to use in the classroom.

One long range interest of Dr. Vaughan’s is better understanding the relationship between the human operator and the control system. Most systems in the world still need some form of human interaction. There are some initial results that suggest there are differences in the control-system compatibility with human operators, even for control systems whose “textbook” analysis is nearly identical. Understanding of this interaction is going to increase in importance as we continue to integrate semi-autonomous systems into society.

Dr. Vaughan also sees some of the main themes discussed above (for promoting the utilization of flexibility as an advantage, primarily through the concurrent design of commands, feedback controllers, and mechanical systems) as being the source of interesting projects for the foreseeable future.