Derek A. Paley

Last updated

Derek Andrew Paley is an American aerospace engineer, academic, and researcher [1] specializing in collective dynamics and control in natural and robotic systems. [2] He is the Willis H. Young Jr. Professor of Aerospace Engineering Education at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he holds a joint appointment with the Institute for Systems Research (ISR). [3] He is the recipient of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics National Capital Section's Engineer of the Year [4] and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. [5]

Contents

He is also the director of the Maryland Robotics Center (MRC) and has affiliations with the Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center. [6]

Education and career

Paley earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Physics from Yale University in 1997 and went on to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2007. [7]

He founded the Collective Dynamics and Control Laboratory (CDCL) in 2007, focusing on the development of algorithms and control systems for autonomous robotic vehicles and bioinspired systems. [8] Since becoming director of the Maryland Robotics Center in 2019, [9] Paley has overseen developments in robotics education and research at the University of Maryland. [10]

He has received teaching awards, such as the UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award and the Exemplary Researcher Award. Paley also serves as the Technical Director of the M.Eng. Robotics program. [11]

The Autonomous Micro Air Vehicle (AMAV) team, which he founded, has won multiple national awards, including the NIST UAS First Responder Challenge. [12] [13] He was also honored as a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher for the 2020–2021 academic year. He is also and associate fellow with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. [11]

Research

His work includes developing distributed control algorithms, conducting hypothesis-driven studies on biological collectives, and optimizing sensor networks for environmental monitoring. [14] His research has been funded by agencies such as DARPA, the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), with total funding exceeding $23 million. [15] [16]

Paley's research integrates dynamics, estimation, and control theory to address challenges in autonomous robotics, mobile sensor networks, and bioinspired engineering. [17]

He has published in the fields of dynamics and controls, with over 100 peer-reviewed articles and his work has been cited more than 8,000 times, with an h-index of 38 as of 2024. [6] In 2021, he explored autonomous scooters as part of his research in robotics and artificial intelligence. [3] His interest in autonomous systems began in the late 1990s when he encountered autonomous underwater vehicles, which led him to pursue graduate studies in control systems. [18] Paley's recent work involves developing self-driving scooters, focusing on their ability to reposition themselves for greater convenience in shared spaces like college campuses. [19]

Paley and his students have built prototypes of autonomous scooters equipped with sensors, working towards a goal of enabling scooters to travel short distances autonomously. [20]

Paley and his team have developed fish-inspired underwater vehicles with flexible tails powered by electric motors and momentum wheels. [21] These robots are designed to mimic real fish movements and respond to hydrodynamic signals, including vortices generated by nearby "fish." [1]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simultaneous localization and mapping</span> Computational navigational technique used by robots and autonomous vehicles

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chicken or the egg problem, there are several algorithms known to solve it in, at least approximately, tractable time for certain environments. Popular approximate solution methods include the particle filter, extended Kalman filter, covariance intersection, and GraphSLAM. SLAM algorithms are based on concepts in computational geometry and computer vision, and are used in robot navigation, robotic mapping and odometry for virtual reality or augmented reality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multi-agent system</span> Built of multiple interacting agents

A multi-agent system is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can solve problems that are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or a monolithic system to solve. Intelligence may include methodic, functional, procedural approaches, algorithmic search or reinforcement learning. With advancements in Large language model (LLMs), LLM-based multi-agent systems have emerged as a new area of research, enabling more sophisticated interactions and coordination among agents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dario Floreano</span> Swiss-Italian roboticist and engineer

Dario Floreano is a Swiss-Italian roboticist and engineer. He is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent System (LIS) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and was the founding director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Swarm robotics</span> Coordination of multiple robots as a system

Swarm robotics is the study of how to design independent systems of robots without centralized control. The emerging swarming behavior of robotic swarms is created through the interactions between individual robots and the environment. This idea emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behavior occurs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Autonomous underwater vehicle</span> Uncrewed underwater vehicle with autonomous guidance system

An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a robot that travels underwater without requiring continuous input from an operator. AUVs constitute part of a larger group of undersea systems known as unmanned underwater vehicles, a classification that includes non-autonomous remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) – controlled and powered from the surface by an operator/pilot via an umbilical or using remote control. In military applications an AUV is more often referred to as an unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV). Underwater gliders are a subclass of AUVs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Underwater glider</span> Type of autonomous underwater vehicle

An underwater glider is a type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that employs variable-buoyancy propulsion instead of traditional propellers or thrusters. It employs variable buoyancy in a similar way to a profiling float, but unlike a float, which can move only up and down, an underwater glider is fitted with hydrofoils that allow it to glide forward while descending through the water. At a certain depth, the glider switches to positive buoyancy to climb back up and forward, and the cycle is then repeated.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobile robot</span> Type of robot

A mobile robot is an automatic machine that is capable of locomotion. Mobile robotics is usually considered to be a subfield of robotics and information engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Magnus Egerstedt</span> Swedish-American roboticist

Magnus B. Egerstedt is a Swedish-American roboticist who is the Dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He was formerly the Steve C. Chaddick School Chair and Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are mechanisms controlled and monitored by computer algorithms, tightly integrated with the internet and its users. In cyber-physical systems, physical and software components are deeply intertwined, able to operate on different spatial and temporal scales, exhibit multiple and distinct behavioral modalities, and interact with each other in ways that change with context. CPS involves transdisciplinary approaches, merging theory of cybernetics, mechatronics, design and process science. The process control is often referred to as embedded systems. In embedded systems, the emphasis tends to be more on the computational elements, and less on an intense link between the computational and physical elements. CPS is also similar to the Internet of Things (IoT), sharing the same basic architecture; nevertheless, CPS presents a higher combination and coordination between physical and computational elements.

John J. Leonard is an American roboticist and Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Leonard is a researcher in simultaneous localization and mapping, and was the team lead for MIT's team at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, one of the six teams to cross the finish line in the final event, placing fourth overall.

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is the director of the Princeton Council on Science and Technology and an associated faculty member in the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and the Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology. She is the founding editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reza Ghodssi</span> Iranian professor

Reza Ghodssi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he directs the MEMS Sensors and Actuators Lab and holds the Herbert Rabin Distinguished Chair in Engineering. Ghodssi is also the Inaugural Executive Director of Research and Innovation for the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University System of Maryland at Southern Maryland (USMSM). He is best known for his work designing micro- and nano-devices for healthcare applications, particularly for systems requiring small-scale energy conversion and biological and chemical sensing.

<i>Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems</i> Academic journal

The Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems is an annual peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Annual Reviews. In publication since 2018, the journal covers developments in the engineering of autonomous and semiautonomous systems through an annual volume of review articles. It is edited by Naomi Ehrich Leonard. As of 2023, Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems is being published as open access, under the Subscribe to Open model. As of 2024, Journal Citation Reports gives the journal an impact factor of 11.2 for the year 2023, ranking it third of 84 journal titles in the category "Automation and Control Systems" and second of 46 journal titles in the category "Robotics".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Silvia Ferrari</span> American aerospace engineer

Silvia Ferrari is an Italian-American aerospace engineer. She is John Brancaccio Professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University and also the director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Control (LISC) at the same university.

Phillip A. Sprangle is an American physicist who specializes in the applications of plasma physics. He is known for his work involving the propagation of high-intensity laser beams in the atmosphere, the interaction of ultra-short laser pulses from high-power lasers with matter, nonlinear optics and nonlinear plasma physics, free electron lasers, and lasers in particle acceleration.

The Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize is an award given by the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) to recognize distinguished contributions to control systems science or engineering. It was established in 1989, named after Hendrik W. Bode (1905–1982), a pioneer of modern control theory and system engineering, who revolutionized both the content and methodology of his chosen fields of research during his long career at Bell Labs and Harvard University.

Matthew Johnson-Roberson is an American roboticist, researcher, entrepreneur and educator. Since January 2022 he has served as director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously he was a professor at the University of Michigan College of Engineering since 2013, where he co-directed the UM Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles (FCAV) with Ram Vasudevan. His research focuses on computer vision and artificial intelligence, with the specific applications of autonomous underwater vehicles and self-driving cars. He is also the co-founder and CTO of Refraction AI, a company focused on providing autonomous last mile delivery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Auke Ijspeert</span> Swiss-Dutch roboticist and neuroscientist

Auke Jan Ijspeert is a Swiss-Dutch roboticist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of biorobotics in the Institute of Bioengineering at EPFL, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the head of the Biorobotics Laboratory at the School of Engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ryan M. Eustice</span> American roboticist

Ryan M. Eustice is an American roboticist, and the Senior Vice President of Human-centric AI and Technology Adoption at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI). He is also a professor of Robotics and Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering at the University of Michigan.

A continuum robot is a type of robot that is characterised by infinite degrees of freedom and number of joints. These characteristics allow continuum manipulators to adjust and modify their shape at any point along their length, granting them the possibility to work in confined spaces and complex environments where standard rigid-link robots cannot operate. In particular, we can define a continuum robot as an actuatable structure whose constitutive material forms curves with continuous tangent vectors. This is a fundamental definition that allows to distinguish between continuum robots and snake-arm robots or hyper-redundant manipulators: the presence of rigid links and joints allows them to only approximately perform curves with continuous tangent vectors.

References

  1. 1 2 "Inspired by Nature: Autonomous Underwater Robotics - IEEE Spectrum". spectrum.ieee.org. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  2. ↑ "Former MAE Graduate Student Derek Paley Builds Fish Inspired Robots | Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering". mae.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  3. 1 2 Laris, Michael. "Shared scooters aren't always where you need them. A U-Md. researcher has a plan for that". Washington Post.
  4. ↑ https://www.colorado.edu/aerospace/sites/default/files/attached-files/derek_paley.pdf Derek Paley - Aerospace Seminar
  5. ↑ "President Obama Honors Outstanding Early-Career Scientists". whitehouse.gov. 2013-12-23. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  6. 1 2 "Dr. Paley joins aerospace faculty". aero.umd.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  7. ↑ "Paley Awarded Willis H. Young Jr. Faculty Fellowship". robotics.umd.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  8. ↑ "Derek Paley". UMD Right Now. 2020-10-13. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  9. ↑ "Newly-Opened SMART Building to Spur Autonomy Research". enme.umd.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  10. ↑ Scott, William L.; Paley, Derek A. (2020). "Geometric Gait Design for a Starfish-Inspired Robot Using a Planar Discrete Elastic Rod Model". Advanced Intelligent Systems. 2 (6): 1900186. doi: 10.1002/aisy.201900186 . ISSN   2640-4567.
  11. 1 2 "Paley, Derek A. | Maryland Robotics Center". robotics.umd.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  12. ↑ "Program". IEEE Military Communications Conference. 2024-05-24. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  13. ↑ "AMAV (UMD)". NIST. 2022-07-29.
  14. ↑ "Anyone can fly their drones at UMD's new flight lab". The Diamondback. January 1000. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  15. ↑ Babcock, Stephen (2021-05-27). "UMD and UMBC are teaming with the Army Research Lab on a $68M effort to advance AI, robotics". Technical.ly. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  16. ↑ "Paley is Principal Investigator for $2M 'SEA-STAR' grant". eng.umd.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  17. ↑ Kaoshar, Joynob; Paley, Derek (2024). "Dynamics and Control of an Autonomous Buoyancy-Driven Underwater Robot". 2024 Regional Student Conferences. AIAA Regional Student Conferences. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. doi:10.2514/6.2024-84606. ISBN   978-1-62410-730-6.
  18. ↑ "NSF Award Search: Award # 2031566 - I-Corps: A Self-driving Autonomous Electric Scooter". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  19. ↑ "Derek Paley's e-scooter work featured in Washington Post". aero.umd.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  20. ↑ "Bird Scooters Are Now Available on Google Maps - dot.LA". dot.la. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
  21. ↑ "Microsoft, UMD Team Up for Diversity in Robotics". Maryland Today. 2022-08-03. Retrieved 2024-11-27.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.