Eric Feron’s research while affiliated with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and other places

With advancements in technology, commercial aircraft formation flying is becoming increasingly feasible as an efficient and environmentally friendly flight method. However, gaps remain in practical implementation, particularly in collision avoidance for aircraft formations. Existing avoidance algorithms mainly focus on single aircraft or UAV swarms, lacking comprehensive studies on the complex interactions within commercial aircraft formations. To address this, this paper proposes an optimization model designed to generate safe and effective collision avoidance solutions for commercial aircraft formations. This model demonstrates avoidance paths for formations facing intruders and offers insights for developing formation flight strategies. This study explores response strategies for commercial aircraft formations encountering intruders, considering the difficulty of pilot maneuvers. The findings provide theoretical support for the practical implementation of commercial formation flying and may advance the adoption of this technology.

Intersections pose critical challenges in traffic management, where maintaining operational constraints and ensuring safety are essential for efficient flow. This paper investigates the effect of intervention timing in management strategies on maintaining operational constraints at intersections while ensuring safe separation distance, avoiding collisions, and minimizing delay. We introduce control regions, represented as circles around the intersection, which refers to the timing of interventions by a centralized control system when agents approach the intersection. We use a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) approach to optimize the system's performance. To analyze the effectiveness of early and late control measures, a simulation study is conducted, focusing on the safe, efficient, and robust management of agent movement within the control regions.

This paper reports a low-g in-plane MEMS inertial switch with multiple acceleration thresholds in multiple sensing directions. Designed for essential monitoring, this device targets low-g accelerations for health and safety applications. The device design utilizes the standard silicon-on-insulator micromachining process (SOIMUMPs) to simplify both fabrication and packaging. Through extensive testing, we demonstrate the switch ability to detect accelerations ranging from 45g to 88g. Despite minor discrepancies due to fabrication imperfections, the experimental results closely match the finite-element simulation results.

Aircraft trajectory is one of the most fundamental objects in air traffic management. Its optimization is essential to ensure efficient and sustainable aviation. This survey proposes to study all the phases of a flight, from its prediction several days before day of flight to the landing of the aircraft, including also the study of a possible emergency situation. Each phase of flight raises different issues and is subject to particular constraints. These guide the choice of potentially usable optimization methods. This study proposes, from the context, the issues, and existing studies, a methodology to identify the most appropriate solution algorithms for optimizing each phase of flight. This methodology is based on 5 evaluation criteria: optimality, computing time, adaptability, memory usage, and multi-trajectories. Finally, thanks to it, some methods are compared based on their consistency with solving problem associated to each phase of flight.

The trade-off between resolution and speed represents a significant challenge when extrusion-based additive manufacturing (AM) is used for large-format additive manufacturing (LFAM). This paper presents an analysis of a new material extrusion process, named selective sheet extrusion (SSE), that aims to decouple these parameters. Unlike traditional single-nozzle material extrusion processes, SSE utilizes a single, very wide nozzle through which extrusion is controlled by an array of dynamically actuated teeth at the nozzle outlet. This allows the system to deposit a selectively structured sheet of material with each pass, potentially enabling the deposition of an entire layer of a part in a single pass. An analysis of the theoretical performance of the SSE technology, in terms of speed and material efficiency in comparison with single-nozzle extrusion systems, predicted speed increases of 2–3 times for the geometries that were explored. The analysis was then validated through experimental work that indicated a normalized improvement in print speed of between 2.3 and 2.5 times using a proof-of-concept SSE prototype. The SSE concept expands the opportunity frontier of LFAM technologies by enabling enhanced print speeds, while maintaining higher resolutions at scale. This enhancement in speed and/or resolution could have significant benefits, especially in large-scale prints that benefit from enhanced internal resolution.

This paper presents a tunable multi-threshold micro-electromechanical inertial switch with adjustable threshold capability. The demonstrated device combines the advantages of accelerometers in providing quantitative acceleration measurements and g-threshold switches in saving power when in the inactive state upon experiencing acceleration below the thresholds. The designed proof-of-concept device with two thresholds consists of a cantilever microbeam and two stationary electrodes placed at different positions in the sensing direction. The adjustable threshold capability and the effect of the shock duration on the threshold acceleration are analytically investigated using a nonlinear beam model. Results are shown for the relationships among the applied bias voltage, the duration of shock impact, and the tunable threshold. The fabricated prototypes are tested using a shock-table system. The analytical results agree with the experimental results. The designed device concept is very promising for the classification of the shock and impact loads in transportation and healthcare applications.

We introduce a new class of quadratic functions based on a hierarchy of linear time-varying (LTV) dynamical systems. These quadratic functions in the higher order space can be also seen as a non-homogeneous polynomial Lyapunov functions for the original system, i.e the first system in the hierarchy. These non-homogeneous polynomials are used to obtain accurate outer approximation for the reachable set given the initial condition and less conservative bounds for the impulse response peak of linear, possibly time-varying systems. In addition, we pose an extension to the presented approach to construct invariant sets that are not necessarily Lyapunov functions. The introduced methods are based on elementary linear systems theory and offer very much flexibility in defining arbitrary polynomial Lyapunov functions and invariant sets for LTV systems.