This Lockheed Martin Researcher’s Work on UAVs Saves Lives

One of his latest initiatives was serving to to design the world’s first autonomous unmanned plane system wherein the complete automobile—not simply its rotors—spins. The micro air automobile was impressed by the aerodynamics of maple seeds, whose twirling slows and prolongs their descent.

The advantages of unmanned aerial automobiles

In a significant challenge greater than a decade in the past, Fregene and colleagues at Lockheed Martin teamed up with Kaman Aerospace of Bloomfield, Conn., on an unmanned model of its Ok-Max helicopter. The Ok-Max can ferry as a lot as 2,700 kilograms of cargo in a single journey. The Lockheed crew created and carried out mission techniques and management algorithms that augmented the management system already on the helicopter, enabling it to fly utterly autonomously.

The U.S. Marine Corps used the autonomous Ok-Max helicopters for resupply missions in Afghanistan. It’s been estimated that these supply flights made tons of of ground-based convoy missions pointless, thereby sparing 1000’s of troops from being uncovered to improvised explosive units, land mines, and snipers.

The autonomous model of the Ok-Max additionally has been demonstrated in disaster-recovery operations. It presents the potential of holding humanitarian support staff away from harmful conditions, in addition to rescuing folks trapped in catastrophe zones.

“It is often better to fly in lifesaving supplies instead of loading trucks with supplies to bring them along roads that might not be passable anymore,” Fregene says.

Ok-Max and one among Lockheed Martin’s small UAVs, the Indago, have been used to combat fires. Indago flies above constructions engulfed in flames and maps out the recent zones, on which Ok-Max then drops flame retardant or water.

“This collaborative mission between two of our platforms means no firefighters are put in harm’s way,” Fregene says.

He and his crew additionally helped within the growth of the maple seed–impressed Samarai, the primary autonomous wholly rotating unmanned plane system. The 41-centimeter-long drone weighs a mere 227 grams. It is dependent upon an algorithm that tells an actuator when and the way a lot to regulate the angle of a flap that determines its route.

Compared with different plane, the spinning drone is easier to provide, requires much less upkeep, and is much less complicated to regulate as a result of its solely management floor is the trailing-edge flap.

IEEE Fellow Kingsley Fregene holds up the maple seed–impressed Samarai, the primary autonomous wholly rotating unmanned plane system.Kingsley Fregene

Saving lives in Nigeria

Fregene’s purpose to maintain folks protected began together with his first after-school job, as a bus conductor, when he was within the sixth grade. As a part of the job, in Oghara, Nigeria, then a small fishing village alongside the Niger River, he collected fares and directed passengers on and off the bus.

With no site visitors cops or site visitors lights, there typically was chaos at main intersections. People would get injured, and he sometimes would get out and direct site visitors.

“I, a little guy, stood out there with a bright orange shirt and started directing traffic,” he says. “It’s amazing that people paid attention and listened to me.”

Many kids are impressed to pursue engineering by twiddling with devices. Not Fregene.

“The circumstances of my childhood did not provide opportunities to get my hands on devices to tinker with,” he says. “What we had were a lot of opportunities to observe nature.”

The presence of oil and gasoline installations in his village, which is within the oil-producing a part of Nigeria, led him to marvel how they labored and the way they have been remotely managed. They didn’t stay mysterious for lengthy.

While attending the Federal University of Technology in Owerri, Nigeria, he interned on the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., which was putting in these distant working techniques, calibrating them, and validating their operation.

After graduating first in his class in 1996 with a bachelor’s diploma in electrical and pc engineering, he went on to graduate college on the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, the place he researched autonomy and computerized management techniques. While incomes grasp’s and doctoral levels, each in electrical and pc engineering, he discovered time to assist these extra needy than he was.

He joined a crew of pupil volunteers who organized drop-in homework golf equipment and offered mentoring to at-risk grade college college students in the neighborhood. The exercise gained him the college’s President’s Circle Award in 2001.

Thinking again on that point, Fregene recollects his interplay with one woman whose life he helped flip round.

“She was dragged kicking and screaming most of the time to complete these sessions,” Fregene recollects. “But she started believing in herself and what she could do. And everything changed. She ended up getting accepted to the University of Waterloo and became part of the UW tutor team I was leading.”

Fregene says his dedication to the tutoring and mentoring program got here from having as soon as been in want of educational help himself. Although he had wonderful grades in historical past and language arts, he did poorly in arithmetic and science. Things rotated for him within the ninth grade when a brand new instructor had a selected manner of instructing math that “turned the light bulb on in my brain,” he says. “My grades took off right after he showed up.”

After finishing his doctorate in 2002, he started working as an R&D engineer at a Honeywell Aerospace facility in Minneapolis. During six years there, he labored on the event of unmanned aerial automobiles together with a drone that was utilized in distant sensing of chemical, organic, radiological, nuclear, and explosive hazards. The drone grew to become the world’s first aerial robotic used for nuclear catastrophe restoration when it flew contained in the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear energy plant within the aftermath of a 2011 tsunami that struck Japan and knocked out the plant’s energy and cooling, inflicting meltdowns in three reactor cores.

At Honeywell he additionally labored on microelectromechanical techniques, that are utilized in gyroscopes and inertial measurement items. Both MEMS instruments, that are used to measure the angular movement of a physique, may be present in cellphones. Fregene additionally labored on a management system to make corrections to the imperfections that diminished the MEMS sensors’ accuracy.

He left the corporate in 2008 to change into lead engineer and scientist on the Lockheed Martin analysis facility in Cherry Hill, N.J.

IEEE membership has its advantages

Fregene grew to become acquainted with IEEE as an undergrad by studying journals such because the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and the IEEE Control Systems journal, for which he has served as visitor editor.

He joined IEEE in grad college, and that call has been paying dividends ever since, he says.

The connections he made by the group helped him land internships at main laboratories, beginning him on his profession path. After assembly researchers at conferences or studying their papers in IEEE publications, he would ship them notes introducing himself and indicating his curiosity in visiting the researcher’s lab and dealing there throughout the summer season. The apply led to internships at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, and on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee.

The IEEE connections helped him get his first job. While engaged on his grasp’s diploma, he introduced a paper on the 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control.

“After my presentation,” he says, “somebody from Honeywell came over and said, ‘That was a great presentation. By the way, these are the types of things we do at Honeywell. I think it would be a great place for you when you’re ready to start working.’”

Fregene stays energetic in IEEE. He’s on the editorial board of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, serves as an affiliate editor for theIEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and just lately accomplished two phrases as chair of the IEEE technical committee on aerospace controls.

IEEE “is the type of global organization that provides a forum for stellar researchers to communicate the work they are doing to colleagues,” he says, “and for setting standards that define real-life systems that are changing the world every day.”