Browsing by Department "Mechanical Engineering"

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Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program (DDETFP) Graduate Fellowship
Mechanical Engineering; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/553; US Department of Transportation
The DDETFP Fellowship provides funding to students for the pursuit of advanced degrees in a transportation-related field at an accredited U.S. Institution of Higher Education (IHE).
Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program (DDETFP) Graduate Fellowship
Mechanical Engineering; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/542; Department of Transportation-Federal Highway Administration
There has been a renewed interest in connected and autonomous vehicles with commercial deployment expected in the near future. Connected vehicles have the potential to improve mobility on roadways by increasing throughput as they allow vehicle following with short inter-vehicular gaps that would otherwise be unsafe for a human driver to maintain. Such platoons have the added benefit of reducing net fuel consumption due to aerodynamic drafting. Naturally, the study of vehicle platoons and vehicle following strategies is important for the future of mobility. Some modern passenger vehicles come equipped with Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), though the implementation varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. Typically, ACC systems allow the user to choose among a few preset time headway options and rely on on-board sensors such as radars/cameras to estimate the relative distance and relative velocity to the vehicle in front. To prevent collisions in a platoon of such vehicles, local uctuations in spacing errors need to be damped out as it propagates down the string of vehicles. It is known [1] that to guarantee string stability for a homogeneous ACC platoon, the time headway employed has to be at least twice the parasitic lags in the vehicles. For a typical passenger car, the actuation lags are in the range of 0:2s to 0:5s , which yields a minimum time headway of 0:4s to 1s. This translates to an inter-vehicle spacing of about 12 to 30 metres at highway speeds. Heavy freight trucks may have larger actuation lags, necessitating spacing greater than 30m. This may not be lucrative especially if the goal is to reduce net fuel consumption, which requires such vehicles to follow closely in order to take advantage of slip-streaming We can further reduce the time headway by equipping the vehicles with wireless transceivers to communicate with each other. Cars can use Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication to obtain additional information about the preceding vehicle's acceleration; this is referred to as Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). A more advanced communication topology can also be utilized which involves using information from two preceding vehicles; we refer to this as CACC+. Analytical results on CACC and CACC+ platoons in the past were built on the assumption that the communication link between the vehicles is ideal. But, in reality, wireless links often experience packet drops and other imperfections due to interference or bandwidth restrictions. Over the course of this project, we built on previous results to incorporate packet drop phenomenon and determine the minimum string stable time headway for both CACC and CACC+ platoon. A copy of the relevant published papers are provided as an attachment.
FW-HTR-P: Toward Collaborative Remote Physical Examination: Transforming Medical and Nursing Practice
Mechanical Engineering; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/1076; National Science Foundation
Since the early in in the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine has seen tremendous growth in the U.S., providing people in under-resourced areas with broader access to healthcare through remote telemedicine visits with health professionals and experts to whom they may not otherwise have access. However, these visits are currently restricted to video teleconference-style exchanges and lack the capacity for physical examinations, which contribute significantly to diagnoses and the identification of health concerns that may not otherwise surface during a medical visit. This project investigates the possibility of supporting physical examination as a paired practice between a caregiver local to the patient and a remote physician, using touch-based and augmented-reality technologies. Caregivers will perform examinations while wearing touch-sensitive gloves, guided by remote physicians using a physical examination cockpit that lets them see and feel the patient using the outputs from the caregiver's gloves and a video feed. The technology and practice will potentially transform the work of physicians and local caregivers, opening the door to more effective and more accessible telemedicine visits. The foregoing discussion uncovers a number of questions that the project is designed to address. First, tactile interpretation is active, meaning that one has to typically be in control of the sensing process to be able to interpret the sensory output. The proposal will explore conditions under which one can meaningfully interpret passively received tactile information, such as what the remote physician would feel when a local (to the patient) caregiver is now in control of the sensing motions. One method to be tested for returning agency to the physician is the psychological phenomenon known as the "rubber hand" or body transfer illusion, where one psychologically associates an appropriately-placed rubber hand as one's own, and an impact on the rubber hand is viscerally felt by the subject. Even if the rubber hand illusion does not fully activate, joint expertise between the local touch explorer and the distant interpreter may facilitate the needed tactile understanding, and this understanding may be enhanced through practice. The project team will explore configurations (e.g., relative positions of the distal toucher's hands to the subject's hidden hands, degree of and type of movement/tactile exploration, visual/augmented reality presentation) that allow body transfer illusions or joint expertise to enable interpretation. The team will also conduct a series of video-based grounded theory explorations of physicians performing physical examinations to gain a better understanding of the process and to categorize specific actions that may serve as the basis of communication between the local caregiver and the distal physician, and to inform the technology developments necessary to enable this collaborative examination. Finally, the project team, comprising physicians and nurses, mechanical engineers, human-computer interaction researchers, and perceptual psychologists, will collaborate on the research described, engaging in team development exercises to gain a stronger shared understanding of the joint physical examination process and support future research and development of these practices and technologies.