Overview
Oregon State University (OSU) is part of the Pan-Pacific Test Site coalition that has established an FAA-approved national test site in the Pacific Northwest to integrate Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) into the national airspace system. Collaborators in the test range effort include the states of Alaska and Hawaii, several industries and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.
Decades of experience in remote sensing have drawn OSU to this venture, as well as broad research spanning several areas of application of UAS. OSU researchers are developing applications for remote sensing of natural resources (e.g., forests, snow pack, coastal environments), agriculture, and hazard/disaster preparedness and response. OSU researchers use optical remote sensing to detect earthquake faults, assess wildfire impacts on forests and measure tsunami inundation patterns. OSU researchers have instruments on the International Space Station to study shoals and ocean shores. OSU intends to leverage these and other capabilities, outline below, to support the UAS industry in Oregon. OSU is developing other technologies to advance a variety of unmanned systems that can be used in the air, in the sea, and on land that broadly address the future needs of society.
Agriculture
There are a number of main campus and extension service faculty and researchers that are exploring precision water, planting, and spraying topics, as well as the use of automation in harvesting a variety of agricultural products. Many OSU researchers work in collaboration with USDA scientists to advance the use of technology in agriculture. For more information on faculty in the College of Agriculture that have an interest in precision agriculture and farming, please contact John Talbott.
Extension Research Centers and Agricultural Experimental Stations: Oregon's principal source of knowledge relating to agricultural and food systems, and a major source of knowledge regarding environmental quality, natural resources, life sciences, and rural economics worldwide. It has more than 400 scientists in 28 academic disciplines working across the state.
OSU Extension Service: connects Oregonians to research-based knowledge through on-the-ground expertise and education. In addition to faculty and specialists stationed in every county of the state, Extension oversees a corps of 20,000 trained Extension volunteers, representing the equivalent of 800 full-time employees in service to Oregon.
Civil Engineering and Infrastructure
The Civil and Construction Engineering department has several components that will leverage UAS, and autonomous systems in general, related to disaster preparedness (specifically the Cascadia Lifelines Program), geodetics, geomatics and geospacial data management for land surveying and transportation systems.
Cascadia Lifelines Project: Oregon State University has established the Cascadia Lifelines Program, a research initiative to help improve critical infrastructure performance during an anticipated major earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone along the coast of Oregon. “Lifelines” are the key to saving lives and minimizing damage, and aiding in recovery of the region following a disaster. The list of participating partners reflects agencies and companies that understand the challenges they will face. The partners include the Oregon Department of Transportation, Portland General Electric, Northwest Natural Gas, the Bonneville Power Administration, Port of Portland, Portland Water Bureau, Eugene Water and Electric Board, and Tualatin Valley Water District. Directed by Scott Ashford.
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Sensor Development: Within the EECS department, there are a variety of research laboratories focused on sensor and device development. These are based on technological advances in materials, thin-films, magnetic, laser and optical properties that apply to low-cost electronics, displays, sensors, communication devices, and LIDAR systems. There are a number of specialized facilities that support research and testing of devices and sensors.
Intelligent Information Systems: This research cluster works to develop technology, processes, and software to enable effective access to and utilization of overwhelming amounts of information. This effort combines knowledge from database, machine learning, information retrieval, networking and human-computer interaction research to create more intelligent information systems. Core strengths include collaborative filtering, probabilistic modeling, spatial databases, usability engineering, web-based interfaces, and wireless computing. These researchers seek to construct computer systems that can build models of their environments and apply those models to make reliable, rapid decisions. They develop new methods for statistical learning, data mining, and probabilistic reasoning and apply these to problems in environmental monitoring, ecological science, manufacturing engineering, space exploration, robot control, and web-based information systems.
Open Source Lab: The Open Source Lab is an organization working for the advancement of open source technologies. The lab provides hosting for more than 160 projects, including those of worldwide leaders like the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation and Drupal. Together, the OSL’s hosted sites deliver nearly 430 terabytes of information every month to people around the world. The most active organization of its kind, the OSL offers world-class hosting services, professional software development and on-the-ground training for promising students interested in open source management and programming.
Natural Resources
The Forest Measurements and Biometrics Lab: Focuses on three major areas and seeks to develop or extend: 1) imputation methods that support dynamic forest inventory, silvicultural planning, and habitat analysis; 2) sampling and statistical methods to characterize and quantify status and change of selected attributes including biomass and carbon and 3) application of LiDAR to forest measurements and assessments. Temesgen Hailemariam.
Remote Sensing Laboratory: The remote sensing laboratory at Oregon State University's College of Forestry uses satellite, airborne and tower-based remote sensing to better understand functioning of forest ecosystems and terrestrial vegetation. Our research spans a large range of topics from mapping landscape disturbance to carbon, water and energy cycling of terrestrial ecosystems to measuring forest structure and productivity at stand level, landscape and global scales. Thomas Hilker.
Forestry and Natural Resources Program Extension Service: Deschutes County
Fisheries and Wildlife Management: The Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University provides comprehensive research, education, and outreach programs related to conservation biology and the management of fish and wildlife resources.
Institute for Water and Watersheds: The IWW is Oregon’s federally-designated water resources research institute. Helping policy makers and water managers working with university faculty to seek solutions to complex water issues. Diverse research teams for inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research.
Institute of Natural Resources: OSU is designated as the lead university to administer INR. OSU established the INR as a research institute to help decision-makers identify and use relevant science in making policy choices. At INR’s foundation is the land grant mission – building bridges between theory and practice and effectively communicating knowledge to decision-makers.
Robotics
The focus of OSU’s robotics and autonomous systems research cluster is the design, modeling and control of systems that observe, move within, interact with, and act upon their environment. Such systems include mobile robots, micro-aerial vehicles and large active sensor networks. The application domains within this research cluster include bipedal and hexapedal robot locomotion, winged and rotor-based micro-aerial vehicle control, robot navigation, multi-robot coordination and distributed sensor network optimization. This program has its home in Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, but draw faculty from many other disciplines such as forestry, agriculture, oceanography, atmospheric sciences, geology, and civil engineering. OSU now offers Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Robotics or a double major such as Robotics and Computer Science.
The proposed degrees will provide an integrated program that will embrace the multi-disciplinary nature of robotics. The program will be directed towards advanced studies related to robotics and include core areas of concentration from each of the disciplines: actuation, locomotion, manipulation, dynamics, control (Mechanical Engineering); sensors, vision, motors (Electrical Engineering); artificial intelligence, human robot interactions (Computer Science)
Oregon State assumed stewardship of the Robot Operating System (ROS) software infrastructure. ROS is an open-source software infrastructure for robotics that is rapidly becoming the de facto standard in academia and industry and is mandated in a number of well-funded government programs. The OSU Open Source Lab is now the primary hosting site for ROS, supporting an estimated 100,000 users worldwide. This is just one more step to cementing Oregon State’s position as a hub for robotics.