Infrastructure

BigActors: a Model for Structure-Aware Computation

Pereira, Eloi
Kirsch, Christoph M.
De Sousa, João Borges
Raja Sengupta
2013

This paper describes a model of computation for structure-aware computing called the BigActor model. The model is a hybrid. It combines the Actor model [1] and the Bigraph model [10]. The contributions of this paper are an operational semantics, an example illustrating how the model supports the concise programming of a mobile agent working in a ubiquitous computing world, a query language enabling a bigActor to observe the world around it, and a definition giving semantics to the feedback loop in control theory in the context of this model. This is followed by three theorems showing how...

The C3UV testbed for collaborative control and information acquisition using UAVs

Pereira, Eloi
Hedrick, Karl
Raja Sengupta
2013

In this paper we introduce the Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles (C3UV) testbed for collaborative information acquisition. The C3UV testbed has been used for demonstrating a wide range of information-oriented applications executed by collaborative teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This paper presents the C3UV testbed from an architectural stand-point. The testbed includes a estimation and control architecture and a software architecture. The estimation and control architecture is a set of components that can be composed to perform specific missions. The software...

The C3UV testbed for collaborative control and information acquisition using UAVs

Pereira, Eloi
Hedrick, Karl
Raja Sengupta
2013

In this paper we introduce the Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles (C3UV) testbed for collaborative information acquisition. The C3UV testbed has been used for demonstrating a wide range of information-oriented applications executed by collaborative teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This paper presents the C3UV testbed from an architectural stand-point. The testbed includes a estimation and control architecture and a software architecture. The estimation and control architecture is a set of components that can be composed to perform specific missions. The software...

Assessing the Value of Urban Air Mobility through Metropolitan-Scale Microsimulation: A Case Study of the San Francisco Bay Area

Yedavalli, Pavan S.
Onat, Emin
Peng, Xin
Raja Sengupta
Waddell, Paul
Bulusu, Vishwanath
Xue, Min
2021

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has garnered billions of dollars in investment with early proofs-of-concept and deployments across the world. However, its viability as a transport mode will be strongly determined by benefits in travel time. Hence, before optimizing the planning and infrastructure provision for UAM’s deployment, the dynamics of UAM trips must first be simulated and understood in order to determine the total addressable market. This work contributes to the existing scholarship in several ways. First, we use an ultra-fast parallelized, GPU-based microsimulator, MANTA, to study the...

SimUAM: A Comprehensive Microsimulation Toolchain to Evaluate the Impact of Urban Air Mobility in Metropolitan Areas

Yedavalli, Pavan
Burak Onat, Emin
Peng, Xin
Raja Sengupta
Waddell, Paul
Bulusu, Vishwanath
Xue, Min
2021

Over the past several years, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has galvanized enthusiasm from investors and researchers, marrying expertise in aircraft design, transportation, logistics, artificial intelligence, battery chemistry, and broader policymaking. However, two significant questions remain unexplored: (1) What is the value of UAM in a region’s transportation network?, and (2) How can UAM be effectively deployed to realize and maximize this value to all stakeholders, including riders and local economies? To adequately understand the value proposition of UAM for metropolitan areas, we develop...

An autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Exploration Platform with a Hierarchical Control Method for Post-Disaster Infrastructures

Peng, Xin
Su, Gaofeng
Raja Sengupta
2024

Catastrophic natural disasters like earthquakes can cause infrastructure damage. Emergency response agencies need to assess damage precisely while repeating this process for infrastructures with different shapes and types. The authors aim for an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platform equipped with a 3D LiDAR sensor to comprehensively and accurately scan the infrastructure and map it with a predefined resolution r. During the inspection, the UAV needs to decide on the Next Best View (NBV) position to maximize the gathered information while avoiding collision at high speed. The...

Autonomous UAV-Based Structural Damage Exploration Platform for Post-Disaster Reconnaissance

Peng, Xin
Su, Gaofeng
Folk, Benjamin
Chen, ZhiQiang
Raja Sengupta
2024

Rapid structural health inspection process is essential for post-disaster reconnaissance.
Nowadays, visual inspection still dominates the practice, which is time-consuming, expensive,
and unsafe. To reduce labor costs and guarantee personnel safety, we develop a fully
autonomous UAV-based structural damage exploration platform that explores and rebuilds post disaster environment maps with limited prior information. As a result, environment maps can be
used for further damage detection and risk evaluation. The proposed platform implements a
closed-loop control strategy...

Urban Air Mobility Research Challenges and Opportunities

Raja Sengupta
Bulusu, Vishwanath
Mballo, Chams Eddine
Onat, Emin Burak
Cao, Shangqing (Albert)
2025

This article reviews the literature on urban air mobility (UAM), examining both the research challenges it presents and the transformative opportunities that make these challenges worth addressing. While UAM has historical precedents, the current iteration is born of novel aircraft technology, primarily electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) and electric short takeoff and landing (eSTOL) aircraft. These advances raise new questions in aerodynamics, control, and integration with urban infrastructure. We explore several key research areas, including aircraft design, vertiport...

From Patchwork to Network: A Comprehensive Framework for Demand Analysis and Fleet Optimization of Urban Air Mobility

Jiang, Xuan
Zhou, Xuanyu
Zhao, Yibo
Cao, Shangqing
Zhao, Jinhua
Mark Hansen
Raja Sengupta
2025

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) presents a transformative vision for metropolitan transportation, but its practical implementation is hindered by substantial infrastructure costs and operational complexities. We address these challenges by modeling a UAM network that leverages existing regional airports and operates with an optimized, heterogeneous fleet of aircraft. We introduce LPSim, a Large-Scale Parallel Simulation framework that utilizes multi-GPU computing to co-optimize UAM demand, fleet operations, and ground transportation interactions simultaneously. Our equilibrium search algorithm is...

Department of Computer Sciences University of Salzburg, Austria

Raja Sengupta
2025

Data center cloud computing distinguishes computational services such as database transactions and data storage from computational resources such as server farms and disk arrays. Cloud computing enables a software-as-a-service business model where clients may only pay for the service they really need and providers may fully utilize the resources they actually have. The key enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. Recent developments, including our own work on virtualization technology for embedded systems, show that service-oriented computing through virtualization may...