LCSR Seminar: Erin Sutton

Description

Erin Sutton, a guidance, navigation, and control engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, will give a talk titled "Flying on Titan: Flight Dynamics Model Validation for NASA's Dragonfly" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing + Robotics.

Abstract:

NASA's Dragonfly mission aims to characterize habitability, study prebiotic chemistry, and search for signs of life on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Given Titan's diverse surface environments, mobility is crucial to the science mission, so controls engineers are faced with the challenge of designing an autonomous flight control system for an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) in uncertain environments. A cornerstone of our approach is flight testing with the Integration and Test Platform, a UAV developed by the Dragonfly team for Earth demonstrations. It is a similar vehicle to the Titan lander, and, crucially, its flight dynamics models are generated using the same processes (e.g., computational fluid dynamics modeling, wind tunnel experiments). We perform flight tests using the Earth analog and identify of the low-speed dynamics of the ITP vehicle. Through quantitative comparison of dynamics between the flight-test data and our simulations, we can evaluate discrepancies in our modeling process. The comparison of the simulated behavior of the test vehicle to the flight-test measurements will guide iterative refinement and ultimate validation of the approach to generate the simulations for both Earth and Titan.

Bio:

Erin Sutton's primary interests are experimental uncrewed aerial vehicles and applying artificial intelligence to heterogeneous teams of defensive vehicles. She finished her doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 2017, where she worked with Noah Cowan on multisensory processing and with Nassir Navab on bioelectric navigation. After graduation, she had a brief stint at the U.S. Navy designing flight simulators for test pilots before joining APL in 2018. Sutton is a space nerd who wants to help people, so she splits her time between space exploration and ballistic missile defense. She met her husband, Alican, in Cowan's lab, and they have two little kids who also want to be engineers.