Page 8 - AEM-Newsletter-Spring-2023

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
Professor Ryan Caverly Receives
2022 NASA Early Career Faculty Award
AEM Assistant Professor Ryan Caverly was awarded a 2022 NASA Early Career Faculty award. The award aims is to support outstanding faculty researchers early in their careers, with a focus on driving researchers to explore ideas and approaches that could benefit the future of science,
space travel, and exploration. The selected research projects receive up to $600,000 over three years to advance their proposed technology.
Caverly’s award targets NASA’s desire to develop advanced technologies for solar sail control, which could enable future science missions for heliophysics and other deep space science. An unsolved challenge in the design of solar sails is ensuring their attitude
and momentum can be controlled accurately and reliably using technology that can scale up to the
size of large, next-generation solar sails. Caverly’s proposed solution comes in the form of
the Cable-Actuated Bio-inspired Lightweight Elastic Solar Sail (CABLESSail), which leverages lightweight cable-driven actuation to achieve controllable elastic solar sail deformations that induce an imbalance in solar radiation pressure and generate large, scalable control torques in all three axes.
Caverly says, “I’m really excited
to get to work on our CABLESSail concept. This project will span
all areas of my research group, including dynamic modeling of flexible multi-body systems, robust control, estimation, simulation, and experimental validation. In addition to the research, my graduate students will contribute to this work. I'm also thrilled that I’ll be able to work with undergraduate researchers and senior design teams on this NASA project. I’m hoping that it will showcase to the students the important role dynamics, control, and estimation play in the design of next-generation space systems.”
Caverly joined the department
in 2018. His research interests include the dynamic modeling and control of aerospace, mechanical, and robotic systems. In particular, he is interested in theoretical developments related to input- output stability, as well as optimal
and robust control of linear and nonlinear systems. His applied research focuses on accurate
yet computationally efficient, dynamic modeling of systems with structural flexibility, such as flexible aircraft, spacecraft, and robotic manipulators, as well as the use of new and existing theories to control these systems.
Diagram of the Cable-Actuated Bio-inspired Lightweight Elastic Solar Sail (CABLESSail).
The award announcement, “NASA Awards Help Universities Advance Next- Generation Space Tech,”
visit the NASA website https://www.nasa.gov/ directorates/spacetech/strg/ ecf22/
8 DEPARTMENT OF AEROSPACE ENGINEERING AND MECHANICS