[CPS] Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer Site at Nebraska!

The NIMBUS Lab is proud to announce that beginning in Summer 2018, we will be hosting a 10 week Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer Site in coordination with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Summer Research Programs.

For more information, and to apply, please visit the Summer Research Program Website https://www.unl.edu/summerprogram/unmanned. The application opens on November 25, 2017, with a Priority Deadline of February 1, 2018. The Application process closes on April 1, 2018.
Students should plan to arrive on June 3, 2018, stay for ten weeks, and have the opportunity to work on one of four exciting research projects:

• Cyber-Physical Attitude Control to Improve CubeSats Performance: Low Earth Orbit is a challenging environment in which increasing numbers of nanosatellites with commercial off-the-shelf components operate. Challenges such as communication, data collection, energy collection, and attitude control must come together with precise timing, usually utilizing inexpensive and imprecise hardware to accomplish mission objectives. Current attitude control strategies, while robust, consume resources even during more quiescent portions of the orbital period. REU students on the project will investigate the application of state-of-the-art control strategies to attitude control for CubeSats that will more effectively allocate resources dynamically in response to environmental, physical, and cyber performance.
• Development and Characterization of Atmospheric Profiling UAVs: Current weather monitoring relies on radars, weather balloons, and airplanes that primarily measure the atmosphere above one thousand meters above ground level, and ground based weather stations that measure the atmosphere between ground level up to about fifty meters. REU students will have the opportunity to investigate this gap in the lower thousand meters of the atmosphere, providing an understanding that is critical to better predict severe weather development and where small UAVs have significant potential to aid.
• Interactions with Telepresence Systems in Complex Environments with and without Explicit Purpose: Much of the research on human-robot interactions occurs in simulated environments or private settings conditions that may make the results difficult to generalize. Through this REU project, we will study human attitudes toward unmanned system in a public space to assist designers with decisions on how to build systems and to aid public space administrators with decisions on how and when to deploy unmanned systems that will be beneficial to patrons.
• Aerial Assisted Management of Assets During Wildfires: Managing wildfires requires a variety of personnel and equipment to operate under dangerous and intense conditions. Keeping track of where personnel and equipment are located with respect to the fire is useful to optimize their utilization and safety. UASs are currently employed to assist in fire monitoring and our lab has pioneered their us in fire ignition, but they are not leveraged to track the location of assets and share them with the fire managers. REU students on the project will investigate devices that can be attached to field assets so that they can be monitored from the UAS, and the analysis of camera footage from the UAS to triangulate that information.

If you have any questions, please email us at nimbus-reu@unl.edu. To learn more about the NIMBUS Lab's ongoing research projects, visit http://nimbus.unl.edu

About the NIMBUS Lab:

NIMBUS is directed by four professors (Drs. Bradley, Detweiler, Duncan, and Elbaum), has over 20 current students, and 20 vehicles (including ground, air, space, and water-based systems). The focus of work is on close interaction of unmanned systems with unstructured environments, and the necessary research to support these interactions, from the controls, software, sensors, and interaction perspectives. NIMBUS has two Vicon laboratories, with workspaces in both the flight labs and in dedicated writing areas. Videos of current projects can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoY5I86gaXctmGr2jl3Dvdw
About UNL Computer Science and Engineering:

The Computer Science and Engineering Department at UNL is quickly growing. CSE has more than 40 faculty members, eight of which have won CAREER awards, and an average of $5 million in research expenditures a year.

About Lincoln:

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is located in an up-and-coming and safe city of 300,000 people that has many of the cultural and entertainment benefits of a much larger city, with the feel of a friendly Midwestern community. With more parkland per capita than Austin, Portland, and all but a handful of U.S. cities, an extensive (and growing) bike trail network, many and diverse employment opportunities, and a low cost of living, Lincoln is one of the fastest growing metro areas in the Midwest.