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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 1,693 records · Page 94
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Towards Secure Autonomous Vehicles: An Integrated Edge and Multi-Modal Machine Learning Framework for Intrusion Detection

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are vulnerable to cyberattacks targeting both internal communication networks and external perception sensors. While edge-based intrusion de- tection for Controller Area Network (CAN) buses offers real-time protection, it cannot detect cross-modal threats. Conversely, multi-modal fusion approaches improve coverage but often lack efficiency for in-vehicle deployment. This thesis integrates two complemen- tary solutions: (1) a lightweight, edge-deployable machine learning framework for CAN bus intrusion detection, and (2) a late-fusion system combining CAN FD and LiDAR data. Together, they form a hierarchical defense capable of handling single-modality and coordi- nated attacks. Simulations show that CAN-only models reach 93% accuracy on simulated DoS, spoofing, replay, and fuzzy attacks, while the fusion system achieves 0.87 AUC and 0.82 F1-score at 2 ms latency. This unified framework establishes a scalable, explainable, and field-ready strategy for AV cybersecurity.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2016

Marine ARM GPCI Investigation of Clouds Infrared Sea Surface Temperature Autonomous Radiometer (ISAR) Field Campaign Report

Sea surface temperature (SST) is one of the most appropriate and important climate parameters: a widespread increase is an indicator of global warming and modifications of the geographical distribution of SST are an extremely sensitive indicator of climate change. There is high demand for accurate, reliable, high-spatial-and-temporal-resolution SST measurements for the parameterization of ocean-atmosphere heat, momentum, and gas (SST is therefore critical to understanding the processes controlling the global carbon dioxide budget) fluxes, for detailed diagnostic and process-orientated studies to better understand the behavior of the climate system, as model boundary conditions, for assimilation into climate models, and for the rigorous validation of climate model output. In order to achieve an overall net flux uncertainty < 10 W/m 2 (Bradley and Fairall, 2006), the sea surface (skin) temperature (SSST) must be measured to an error < 0.1 C and a precision of 0.05 C. Anyone experienced in shipboard meteorological measurements will recognize this is a tough specification. These demands require complete confidence in the content, interpretation, accuracy, reliability, and continuity of observational SST data—criteria that can only be fulfilled by the successful implementation of an ongoing data product validation strategy.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Closed-Loop Control of Active Nematic Flows

Stabilizing and shaping autonomous flows of active fluids is a fundamental challenge and a prerequisite for applications. We embed a light-responsive microtubule-based nematic in a proportional-integral control loop that adjusts the applied light intensity in response to real-time measurements of the spatially averaged flow speed. The self-regulating hardware-software-wetware system maintains a target flow speed against external or internal perturbations, including protein aging and aggregation, sample-to-sample variability, and temperature variation. Varying the controller’s gains reveals antagonistic roles between feedback and intrinsic processes, leading to nontrivial dynamics observed in fluctuation spectra. In particular, oscillations emerge from the interplay between the controller, motor binding kinetics, and active hydrodynamic relaxation. Accounting for the underlying binding timescale, our coarse-grained model and nematohydrodynamics simulations corroborate these observations. This work provides insight into the coupled dynamics of controlled active matter, laying the foundation for spatiotemporal patterning of active stress to generate and stabilize new dynamical configurations.

Active nematics↗
DOE OSTI2020

Advanced Models and Fast Simulation Algorithms for MARS Plants

With the successful commercialization of modular multilevel converters (MMC) and rapid increase in photovoltaic (PV) penetration and energy storage systems (ESS), one of the research areas being explored dynamically is integration of PV systems and ESS systems to MMCs. On this front, an integrated development of PV plants, ESS, and alternating- and direct-current (ac/dc) systems through Multi-Port Autonomous Reconfigurable Solar (MARS) plant is proposed and being researched upon. However, simulation of MARS systems on traditional existing software takes very long time (order of days) due to the presence of a large number of states and non-linear devices. Therefore, development of fast high fidelity models is of paramount importance to test the hardware design, control design and planning of power system expansions. In this context, two research objectives are addressed in this paper: firstly, an ultra fast single- or multi- CPU simulation algorithm to simulate the MARS system based on state-space models, hybrid discretization algorithm with a relaxation technique that reduces the imposed computational burden and a multi-rate method is presented. Secondly, a reduced order model of MARS is also presented. Both the developed techniques are validated with respect to reference PSCAD/EMTDC model.

Marthi, Phani Ratna Vanamali↗
DOE OSTI2019

Multichannel Processing of Vibrational Response Measurements: An Application of Constrained Subspace Identification

Dynamic structural systems occur in a wide variety of applications such as autonomous ve-hicles employed militarily for battlefield management or non-military tasks like tracking awildfire in the hills of a drought-ridden area. Many such systems operating in the air or atsea employ a variety of subsystems ranging from airfoils for flight or machinery for propulsionor reactor components as simple as pipes carrying cooling for control.

42 ENGINEERING↗
NASA NTRS1991

Conceptual design of a multiple cable crane for planetary surface operations

A preliminary design study is presented of a mobile crane suitable for conducting remote, automated construction operations on planetary surfaces. A cursory study was made of earth based mobile cranes and the needs for major improvements were identified. Current earth based cranes have a single cable supporting the payload, and precision positioning is accomplished by the use of construction workers controlling the payload by the use of tethers. For remote, autonomous operations on planetary surfaces it will be necessary to perform the precision operations without the use of humans. To accomplish this the payload must be stabilized relative to the crane. One approach for accomplishing this is to suspend the payload on multiple cable. A 3-cable suspension system crane concept is discussed. An analysis of the natural frequency of the system is presented which verifies the legitimacy of the concept.

Mikulas, Martin M., Jr.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Vibration isolation technology development to demonstration

The main thrust of these studies has resulted in an active inertial feedforward/feedback isolation system. This prototype magnetic suspension system has been demonstrated in a laboratory setting in six degrees-of-freedom and has been preliminarily characterized in its isolation performance with favorable results. This isolation system consists of a closed loop digital control system referencing a platform around six relative and six inertial sensors. These sensors control the isolated mass through nine attractive electromagnetic actuators with a system capability of +/- three-tenths of an inch travel in three dimensions. The development of a prototype system from design to fabrication leads directly into the demonstration phase of the project which will attempt a low gravity environmental demonstration of engineering hardware for the isolation of a scientific payload. The demonstration phase of the project will use an aircraft low gravity maneuver to establish a research testbed for the study of isolation hardware and control strategies in an off-loaded environment. In developing this demonstration capability the Lewis Learjet aircraft has been characterized through its parabolic flight maneuvers and a trunnioned experimental volume has been designed for the test of both active and passive isolation packages. This vibration isolation testbed is operational and has two data acquisition systems available for both autonomous and interactive operation, with a combined input capability of 32 channels.

Grodsinsky, Carlos↗
NASA NTRS2010

The Evolution of Extravehicular Activity Operations to Lunar Exploration Based on Operational Lessons Learned During 2009 NASA Desert RATS Field Testing

This paper will present options to evolutionary changes in several philosophical areas of extravehicular activity (EVA) operations. These areas will include single person verses team EVAs; various loss of communications scenarios (with Mission Control, between suited crew, suited crew to rover crew, and rover crew A to rover crew B); EVA termination and abort time requirements; incapacitated crew ingress time requirements; autonomous crew operations during loss of signal periods including crew decisions on EVA execution (including decision for single verses team EVA). Additionally, suggestions as to the evolution of the make-up of the EVA flight control team from the current standard will be presented. With respect to the flight control team, the major areas of EVA flight control, EVA Systems and EVA Tasks, will be reviewed, and suggested evolutions of each will be presented. Currently both areas receive real-time information, and provide immediate feedback during EVAs as well as spacesuit (extravehicular mobility unit - EMU) maintenance and servicing periods. With respect to the tasks being performed, either EMU servicing and maintenance, or the specific EVA tasks, daily revising of plans will need to be able to be smoothly implemented to account for unforeseen situations and findings. Many of the presented ideas are a result of lessons learned by the NASA Johnson Space Center Mission Operations Directorate operations team support during the 2009 NASA Desert Research and Technology Studies (Desert RATS). It is important that the philosophy of both EVA crew operations and flight control be examined now, so that, where required, adjustments can be made to a next generation EMU and EVA equipment that will complement the anticipated needs of both the EVA flight control team and the crews.

Bell, Ernest R., Jr.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Sustainable Power for the Lunar Surface

The Propulsion and Power Systems Alliance promotes programmatic and technical collaboration between government agencies in order to better utilize existing program resources in the areas of power and propulsion. This presentation will provide other government agencies an idea of the ongoing work at NASA GRC for power, focusing on the use of a microgrid for sustainable lunar surface power and autonomous power control development for the lunar surface microgrid.

Jeffrey Csank↗
DOE OSTI2020

Resilient Autonomous Wind Farms

With the advent of an increasing number of control strategies that seek to optimize wind turbine performance on a farm level, taking into account individual wind turbine information to achieve wind-farm-level objectives has become an increasingly important goal. Methods for controlling wind turbines on an individual and farm level have experienced significant development, and an abundance of new implementations for gathering and using data from turbines have created potential for novel control mechanisms that can further optimize the performance and delivery characteristics of a wind farm. A key element of making these wind farms more efficient is to develop reliable algorithms that use local sensor information that is already being collected, such as from local meteorological stations, nearby radars, sodars, and lidars, and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data. Making use of information from all wind turbines in a wind farm can enable such approaches as determining the atmospheric conditions across the farm, improving fault-finding, and ensuring more efficient overall control of farmwide optimizations through mechanisms such as wake steering. However, these approaches typically involve a centralized communications and control center. In order to ensure the resilient operation of the farm, it is necessary to develop an approach that distributes the calculation and communication amongst multiple nodes throughout the farm. In this fashion, a redundant, robust, and secure network can be created, which can tolerate faults in calculation, communication, and even external attacks that seek to disrupt the operation of the wind farm. This paper introduces the use of the Raft-Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant algorithm in the implementation of autonomous control of a wind farm. This implementation will allow for fault tolerance for malfunctioning nodes, sensors, transmitters, and connectors. This approach is equally extensible to account for malicious actors. It will...

fault tolerance↗
NASA NTRS1989

Simple autonomous Mars walker

Under a contract with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Martin Marietta has developed several alternative rover concepts for unmanned exploration of the planet Mars. One of those concepts, the 'Walking Beam', is the subject of this paper. This concept was developed with the goal of achieving many of the capabilities of more sophisticated articulated-leg walkers with a much simpler, more robust, less computationally demanding and more power efficient design. It consists of two large-base tripods nested one within the other which alternately translate with respect to each other along a 5-meter beam to propel the vehicle. The semiautonomous navigation system relies on terrain geometry sensors and tacticle feedback from each foot to autonomously select a path which avoids hazards along a route designated from earth. Both mobility and navigation features of this concept are discussed including a top-level description of the vehicle's physical characteristics, deployment strategy, mobility elements, sensor suite, theory of operation, navigation and control processes, and estimated performance.

Larimer, Stanley J.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Robotic Lunar Lander Development Project Status

This slide presentation reviews the status of the development of a robotic lunar lander. The goal of the project is to perform engineering tests and risk reduction activities to support the development of a small lunar lander for lunar surface science. This includes: (1) risk reduction for the flight of the robotic lander, (i.e., testing and analyzing various phase of the project); (2) the incremental development for the design of the robotic lander, which is to demonstrate autonomous, controlled descent and landing on airless bodies, and design of thruster configuration for 1/6th of the gravity of earth; (3) cold gas test article in flight demonstration testing; (4) warm gas testing of the robotic lander design; (5) develop and test landing algorithms; (6) validate the algorithms through analysis and test; and (7) tests of the flight propulsion system.

Hammond, Monica↗
NASA NTRS2011

Space Environments Testbed

The Space Environments Testbed (SET) is a flight controller data system for the Common Carrier Assembly. The SET-1 flight software provides the command, telemetry, and experiment control to ground operators for the SET-1 mission. Modes of operation (see dia gram) include: a) Boot Mode that is initiated at application of power to the processor card, and runs memory diagnostics. It may be entered via ground command or autonomously based upon fault detection. b) Maintenance Mode that allows for limited carrier health monitoring, including power telemetry monitoring on a non-interference basis. c) Safe Mode is a predefined, minimum power safehold configuration with power to experiments removed and carrier functionality minimized. It is used to troubleshoot problems that occur during flight. d) Operations Mode is used for normal experiment carrier operations. It may be entered only via ground command from Safe Mode.

Leucht, David K.↗
NASA NTRS2022

Water Quality Contamination Sources and Controls for the Exploration Extra-vehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU)

NASA has been developing a new spacesuit, called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) for over a decade. This spacesuit is underdevelopment to support missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and also to the Moon. The xEMU uses controlled evaporative cooling through a membrane to reject waste heat from the crewmember, avionics, and environmental in-leak during autonomous operation. Given the unique mass and volume constraints imposed by the spacesuit application and the opportunities presented by the selection of a given membrane, the xEMU does not possess a separate feedwater loop to feed the evaporation process, rather the feedwater for the evaporation process is fed directly from the transport loop which collects heat from the sources within the suit. This has many benefits including mass/volume reductions from a lower component count within the system but does pose some additional potential constraints on water quality within the system in order to provide a working fluid that can be pumped, filtered, and used in contact with the remainder of the system while both avoiding fouling of the membrane as well as other deleterious effects such as creating conditions for corrosion of wetted surfaces within the transport loop. The discussion will seek to address the main sources of contamination and the applied controls. Sources considered will include: self-generated via materials selection and processes applied, influent working fluid, contamination of the influent working fluid via Ground Support Equipment (GSE) or processing equipment, microbial activity, and environmental influences such as elevated ambient CO2.

Colin Campbell↗
DOE OSTI2024

Advanced Laboratory and Field Arrays (ALFA)/Lab Collaboration Project (LCP) for Marine Energy (Final Scientific/Technical Report)

The objective of the Advanced Laboratory and Field Arrays (ALFA) project was to reduce the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) of Marine and Hydrokinetic (MHK) energy by leveraging research, development, and testing capabilities at Oregon State University, University of Washington, and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. ALFA is a project within the Pacific Marine Energy Center (PMEC; formerly NNMREC), a multi-institution entity with a diverse funding base that focuses on research and development for marine renewables. The ALFA project aimed to accelerate the development of next-generation arrays of wave energy conversion (WEC) and tidal energy conversion (TEC) devices through a suite of field-focused R&D activities spanning a broad range of strategic opportunity areas identified in the Funding Opportunity Announcement: • Device and/or array operation and maintenance (O&M) logistics development; • High-fidelity resource characterization and/or modeling technique development and validation; • Array-specific component technology development (e.g. moorings and foundations, transmission, and other offshore grid components); • Array performance testing and evaluation; and • Novel cost-effective environmental monitoring techniques and instrumentation testing and evaluation. The objective of the Lab Collaboration Project (LCP) was to accelerate the development of next-generation marine energy conversion systems. The LCP aimed to achieve these project objectives in collaboration with the national laboratories by: • Developing concept generation and assessment tools; • Improving access to existing testing resources; • Validating collision risk models between fish and turbines; and • Advancing analysis and simulation capabilities for wave-WEC interactions and PTO analysis in nonlinear ocean waves. The ALFA portion of the project was comprised of six overarching technical tasks: • Task 1: Debris Modeling, Detection and Mitigation; • Task 2: Autonomous Monitoring & Intervention; • Task 3: Resource Characterization for Extreme Conditions; • Task 4: Robust Models for Design of Offshore Anchoring and Mooring Systems; • Task 5: Performance Enhancement for Marine Energy Converter (MEC) Arrays; and • Task 6: Evaluating Sampling Techniques for MHK Biological Monitoring. The LCP was divided into four overarching technical tasks: • Task 7: Project Management and Reporting • Task 8: Novel Design and Assessment Methodologies for Wave Energy Converter Design (Wave- SPARC) • Task 9: Testing Access for Commercial Marine Renewable Energy Technology Developers • Task 10: Quantifying Collision Risk for Fish and Turbines • Task 11: Nonlinear Ocean Waves and PTO Control Strategy Each ALFA/LCP task listed above functioned as a separate and discreet project. A final Technical Report was written for each individual task and these reports were uploaded to OSTI, after receiving DOE approval. The following document is a compilation of each of these final, approved reports arranged as individual chapters.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Seeing is Believing: Autonomous Microscopy and the Data Revolution in Materials Science [Slides]

Machine intelligence has the potential to revolutionize materials science, enabling autonomous synthesis, self-driving characterization, and accelerated modeling. However, despite the promise, successful implementation of these methods in day-to-day research remains a challenge. This talk will delve into the reasons behind this, exploring how truly intelligent experiments are hindered by opaque experiment control, a lack of domain-specific models, and human-centric design. Through a focus on the characterization of next-generation microelectronics and energy storage materials, I will share insights from both successful and failed attempts to implement machine intelligence. We will then explore the next steps necessary to unlock the full potential of machine intelligence in materials science, creating a future where intelligent systems work seamlessly alongside researchers to drive innovation and discovery.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2016

Bounded extremum seeking for angular velocity actuated control of nonholonomic unicycle

Here, we study control of the angular-velocity actuated nonholonomic unicycle, via a simple, bounded extremum seeking controller which is robust to external disturbances and measurement noise. The vehicle performs source seeking despite not having any position information about itself or the source, able only to sense a noise corrupted scalar value whose extremum coincides with the unknown source location. In order to control the angular velocity, rather than the angular heading directly, a controller is developed such that the closed loop system exhibits multiple time scales and requires an analysis approach expanding the previous work of Kurzweil, Jarnik, Sussmann, and Liu, utilizing weak limits. We provide analytic proof of stability and demonstrate how this simple scheme can be extended to include position-independent source seeking, tracking, and collision avoidance of groups on autonomous vehicles in GPS-denied environments, based only on a measure of distance to an obstacle, which is an especially important feature for an autonomous agent.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗