Students and faculty in the Department of Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering are some of the more prolific researchers in the Embry-Riddle family. The department's research expenditures are nearly one-half those of the entire College of Engineering, with support from federal agencies including NSF, FAA, and NOAA as well as industry partners. The department is heavily involved in projects managed by ERAU's NEAR Lab and by the COE's Eagle Flight Research Center.

Strategic department research directions include three areas critical for the future of aerospace. These are:

  • Detect and avoid technologies for unmanned aircraft systems;
  • Assured systems for aerospace, including cybersecurity and development assurance;
  • Modeling and simulation for aviation and aerospace.

Detect and avoid technologies enable unmanned aircraft systems to "see and be seen" by other aircraft and by air traffic controllers on the ground. Of particular challenge is detect and avoid of uncooperative aircraft, those aircraft that aren't equipped to announce their position either automatically or in response to interrogations from the ground.

Assured systems are those that are robust in the face of cybersecurity challenges, with assured development being system design approaches that yield assured systems without high overhead.

Modeling and simulation for aviation involves everything from the logistics of getting passengers onto aircraft to planning how to get all air traffic around predicted bad weather without upsetting arrival times and locations.

Creating Connections: Bed bugs to UAV Swarms

PI Bryan Watson

​The overarching goal of our research is to advance our understanding of bed bug behavior and use this understanding to improve performance of aerospace swarms.

Modern aerospace systems need a new approach for swarm consensus that is distributed, operates with local knowledge, and uses simple agents. The overarching goal of our research is to advance our understanding of bed bug behavior and use this understanding to improve performance of aerospace swarms. The first step is to understand individual bed bug response to stimuli (CO2, heat, light) and individual neural characteristics, before considering group dynamics. The objective of this research was to establish a collaboration between biologists and engineers at ERAU to design and implement a test-platform to enable new data collection for bed bug movement. This collaboration begins by examining individual bed bug response to CO2 concentration. Our central hypothesis is that if we record bed bug response to CO­2 exposure, then we will be able to improve our understanding of collective decision making because the bed bugs coordinate their response to environmental conditions. The research involved five undergraduate students from three campuses.

Research Dates

05/14/2023

Researchers

  • Bryan Watson

    Bryan Watson

    Department
    Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept
    Degrees
    Ph.D., M.S., Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
    B.S., United States Naval Academy