NIA | Langley Professors

North Carolina A&T State University Langley Professor

David Song, Ph.D.
Director, the Center for High Confidence Cooperative Systems

Research Interests and Specialty Areas:

"The NIA advantage is that grad students work with established professors,
a national laboratory and experienced scientists and engineers. Students
receive joint advice, both from their teachers and NASA researchers. You
work at the cutting edge, directly related to advanced applications. You
concentrate on problems that have relevancy to the real world."

Humans usually react quickly to danger, with reflexes honed by tens of thousands of generations of biological change and maturation. Machines have no such heritage; avoidance, recovery and adaptability must be engineered in. For Dr. David Song, responsive and intelligent controls will distinguish succeeding generations of machine systems from their not-as-nimble predecessors.

Dr. Song’s background is in systems modeling, controls and simulation. His focus is on adaptive and intelligent controls, with application to a variety of aerospace uses. Dr. Song’s emphasis is identifying and developing ways to make controls as robust as is possible: more reliable, more adaptive and, ultimately, less expensive.

Dr. Song has held the position of professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University since 2004. He joined North Carolina A&T in 1993 as assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 1999. Dr. Song is the project director for A&T’s contribution to NASA’s third-generation Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV), a program that has as a primary objectives demonstration of technologies leading to a new generation of space boosters capable of delivering payloads at significantly lower cost, as well as support of a technology base to make American aerospace manufacturers more competitive in global markets.

Dr. Song has conducted research on cooperative control of unmanned ground vehicles, and on biologically inspired adaptive and reconfigurable systems. He is a team member of the NASA Center for Aerospace Research (NASA/CAR), the Center for Power Electronic Systems (NSF-CPES), and the Center for Energy Research Technology (CERT).

Dr. Song received degrees in electrical engineering from the Cheng Du University of Science and Technology (B.S.) and Chong Qing University (M.S.), both in China, and his Ph.D. from Tennessee Technological University.

Examining Real-World Issues

Cooperative operation is of fundamental importance in complex autonomous vehicle systems. Dr. Song’s research - in both theoretical and real-time experimental studies - includes dynamic modeling, path planning, trajectory tracking, vision-based control, motion coordination, close formation and simulation of multiple manned and unmanned vehicle systems. The primary objectives of Dr. Song’s experiments are to validate the feasibility of practical implementation of methods and algorithms and to foster innovation to overcome potential obstacles.

For the cooperative operation of manned and unmanned vehicles, real-world issues such as sensor noise, communication dropout, communication delay, computation latency and unexpected disturbances can degrade performance and lead to catastrophic failures. Sensors that are inherently asynchronous with varied sample rates can pose challenges for estimation and coordination.

In terms of vehicle systems, airframe payload influences the choice of sensors and onboard computers and thus the inherent capabilities of the vehicle. Environmental factors, such as wind, weather, lighting, and other battlefield terrain variations can adversely affect sensor and control system performance.

Minimizing Emergency

Field tests often expose the unanticipated challenges that must be dealt with in real-world scenarios. Such hurdles often force significant innovations to occur to enable success.

Experimental research and the development of an experimental testbed require and enable a broad spectrum of engineering and research activities. These activities can draw on the talents and contributing efforts of undergraduate and graduate students alike. Unmanned vehicle systems testbed development typically demands skills from multiple disciplines including mechanisms and machine design, electronics, programming, control and systems integration.

In extreme cases, control surfaces and aerospace structures can fail. The ultimate goal of all advanced-controls efforts should be to propagate, quantify and precisely model these possible failure modes to prevent any potential emergency from occurring or, at the least, to mitigate its effects so there will be little or no impact on human pilots or passengers.

"Controls plan an increasingly important role these days. It's the
ability to be autonomous, to function without much human control, to
adjust rapidly to an unanticipated event. The real emphasis is on
coming up with radical solutions to make controls more reliable, more
adaptive and less expensive. What's important and what's useful is
self-healing, self-repair and reconfiguration on the move."

The Center for High Confidence Cooperative Systems (HCCS)

The Center complements and integrates existing expertise and activities at NIA, fully supporting the NIA mission of NIA while meeting the national standards of research in interdisciplinary HCCS areas. The HCCS research agenda strengthens collaboration among scientists from different backgrounds and institutions, and generates new paradigms and tools for the design of highly reliable and autonomous systems in many safety-critical applications, including medical devices, transportation, space exploration, and national security needs.

The broader impact comes in the long-term with the increased collaboration between NIA and other major institutions as well as national research labs. The Center actively engages in scientific research and is developing advanced laboratory facilities.

More specifically, the Center facilitates learning, investigation and research in the multidisciplinary field of cooperative systems engineering. Students are able to develop a better understanding of cooperative systems theory and are able to put that theory into practice. The HCCS supports and enhances such activities as:

Practices of analogue, digital and computer control
Process controls, adaptive systems and intelligent instrumentation
High-speed motion control, robotics, vision sensing, recognition and machine perception
Use of artificial intelligence in control systems
Mechatronics: variable speed drives and power electronics
Systems design and simulation
CAD/CAM, integrated automation and intelligent robotic welding systems
Robotic systems
Variable speed drives, servomotor drives, rotary and linear stepping
Motor drives, motion control systems, fuzzy logic control and neural networks
Vision systems and image processing software
Process control and servo-training systems
Non-contact (electromagnetic) suspension systems
Magnetic bearings
Power electronics training
Data acquisition and control software
PLCs, micro-controllers and development systems
AutoCAD (with AME)

Contact Information: E-mail | (757) 325-6860