Research

The Department of Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering prides itself on supporting research activities that can be brought back into the undergraduate and graduate classroom. Faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students participate in a range of research activities, some housed solely within the department, others consisting of researchers with the College of Engineering or the Daytona Beach campus, and still others involving sets of researchers located around the world. Reflecting the broad range of department interests and expertise, projects vary from investigations of how to develop automatic tools to generate software for use in safety-critical systems to analysis of signals received by an array of radio telescopes.

Examples of the diverse set of projects investigated recently by department faculty include:

• Automatic code generating tools for safety-critical real-time software
• Blind signal separation in dynamic environments
• Chemical plume tracing using unmanned underwater vehicles
• Development tool qualification for safety-critical hardware and software
• Feasibility of using ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) for aerospace wireless sensor networks
• Mission plan representations for autonomous reasoning of consequences
• Model-based software quality assurance with the architecture analysis and design language
• Orbit determination of Earth-orbiting satellites using the Allen Telescope Array
• Performance analysis of web servers: Apache and Microsoft IIS
• Probabilistic methodology for optimal satellite tracking and data acquisition tasking
• Remote airport lighting system
• Simultaneous switching noise and safety-critical airborne hardware
• Software property validation
• Spectral bandwidth impact adopting next generation airspace technologies
• Target acquisition in a cooperative unmanned vehicle system
• Technology survey of command, control, and communication for unmanned aircraft systems
• Using abstraction to aid constraint-based robot task selection

• Bistatic Radar
  Faculty in the Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering Department at Embry-Riddle are developing a new radar that may alter the paradigm of locating aircraft.
• Wireless Sensors for Aircraft
  With the advance of new technologies, more and more sensors will be employed in various aircrafts to improve the safety, capacity, efficiency, and environmental friendliness of air transportation.
• Blind signal separation in dynamic environments
  Blind source separation (BSS) is a powerful statistics analysis tool capable of revealing hidden mechanisms and source signals from their combinations. It has a wide variety of practical applications in areas like image and speech processing, telecommunications, financial engineering, biomedical signal processing, and text document analysis, etc.
• A Curriculum Wide Software Development Case Study
  This NSF funded research develops case studies of software development for use in software engineering instruction . Products include realistic projects, complete artifacts throughout the software development life cycle, case studies decoupled from a particular text book, and case modules designed with varying complexity allowing for use in multiple classes throughout undergraduate and graduate curricula.
• Engineering Global Leaders
  In this multi-institution engineering mobility project sponsored by the Fund for Improving Post-Secondary Education of the US Department of Education, participating students and faculty concentrate on engineering education and research by supporting study abroad.
• EcoCAR IDEA
  The Intelligent Drive Efficiency Assistant (IDEA) is a product under development as part of the EcoCAR Competition. Unlike traditional hybrid control systems, which are typically reactive, IDEA attempts to identify up-coming driving conditions and make recommendations to the hybrid system’s supervisory control unit.
• From Middle School to Industry Vertical Integration to Inspire Interest in Computational Thinking
  While students typically do not see immediate advantages of the topics being studies, top down integration exposes students to larger, more complex projects, giving them better appreciation for topics as they realize the “big picture.” Funded by the National Science Foundation, this research seeks to vertically integrate software development best practices from industry to graduate, undergraduate, high school, and middle school academic programs, with the intention of increasing student interest in computing and computational thinking.
• NextGen Task E
  The FAA’s NextGen Task E is a series of demonstrations incorporating NextGen technologies into today’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Working with AAI’s Shadow and General Atomics Predator B / Guardian, Task E make four-dimensional flight control, Cockpit Display of Traffic Information, and Voice-over-IP radio technologies available in the ground control station of an unmanned aircraft.
• NextGen Task G
  NextGen Task G focuses on using time based metrics to improve delivery accuracy of an aircraft at a specific point in space. The project studies the feasibility and effects of assigning Required Time of Arrival (RTA) requirements to aircraft. The flight trajectory is thus considered a 4-Dimensional (4D) object, and air traffic control shifts to Trajectory Based Operations (TBO).
• FAA NextGen Task K Demonstration of Flight Data Object Planning
  Dr. Stansbury of the ECSSE Department is working in collaboration with the Florida NextGen Testbed to support FAA NextGen Task K. Task K involves the preparation for a Pacific regional demonstration of the Flight Data Object (FDO).
• NOAA UAS for In-Situ Tropical Cyclone Sensing
  For this project, Embry-Riddle faculty and students are collaborating with the sponsor, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, to produce an unmanned aircraft supporting in-situ sensing of a tropical cyclone environment near the ocean surface.
• Remote Airfield Lighting System
  There are many remote airfields that are not connected to the power grid. Providing adequate lighting to these airfields is necessary and challenging. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has sponsored a research project, Remote Airfield Lighting Systems (RALS), through the Center for General Aviation Research (CGAR).
• SETI
  Dr. Barott is a research engineer with the SETI Institute for the Allen Telescope Array, a large radio telescope located at the Hat Creek Observatory. Dr. Barott is the lead engineer for the array's beamformer, an instrument that combines the receiving sensitivity of 42 independent antennas into a single data stream using high-speed FPGAs.
• Encouraging Students to Pursue an Engineering Education and Career
  This NSF-sponsored project provides scholarship for engineering students pursuing degrees in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and software engineering. Working closely with faculty and student mentors, scholarship recipients are involved in multi-disciplinary projects involving unmanned and autonomous systems throughout their four years of undergraduate study.
• Web-based tool for outcomes-based assessment
  As part of an internally funded grant, faculty members in the ECSSE Department are developing a new web-based tool for assessment of student performance toward learning and curriculum assessment outcomes. The tool will allow teachers to produce online quizzes and exams. The instructor can define the solution and associated outcomes for each question. After the exam, the web tool shall grade all submissions and provide reports regarding the class’s overall performance toward each outcome.