Tony Adami ENGINEERING
SAFER SKIES
Shoemaker, who plans to display her work in America and The Netherlands, hopes her photographs will change people’s perspectives of drug addiction.
Angela Shoemaker
“Attention needs to be drawn to this,” Lovett says. “These towns became this way because of short-term, profit-driven thinking. One hundred years later we’re suffering environmental damage.” Lovett displayed this work last fall in “The Crude and the Rare,” a group exhibition on extractive industries and the value of natural resources at the Cooper Union, a college in New York City. The runoff from century-old mines is highly acidic and full of heavy metals, which can give the streams an orange or white tint. Lovett wanted to document that damage “in a way that’s fair and that also shows problems with documentation,” he says. To create the most neutral images possible, he removed his point-of-view. He took the lid off his scanner, Velcroed it to the back of his tablet PC, and connected the two. He next placed the laptop beside streams and scanned the three-dimensional environment. The resulting images combine rich textures and colors with lines and errors from the machine. “There’s a really nice honesty in that record,” Lovett says. The act of creating art out of the region’s concerns was also a way of going beyond himself. Because he tends to view art as self-referential and self-involved, Lovett says he favors science. However, science has its disadvantages as well, he notes: “Science fails because it describes things in too much detail, in a way you can’t relate to. Art gives you a portal.” Katie Brandt
Conventional autopilots have been used in military aircraft and commercial airliners for decades, but they have their limitations. Most systems—which actually require pilot intervention—guide the aircraft by plotting points along their course and flying from point to point until they arrive at the final destination. If a pilot loses control of the aircraft, conventional autopilots often aren’t able to help. Tony Adami, an engineering graduate student and Avionics Engineering Center research engineer, and Professor J. Jim Zhu are designing a new and improved autopilot controller that could dramatically reduce the cost of this technology and increase the safety of flying airplanes. Their design, called Trajectory Linearization Control, could be used in aircraft ranging from unmanned air vehicles to commercial passenger flights. It can guide an aircraft along a line directly from point A to B using sensors to monitor the actual flight path, and can make adjustments without human intervention, explains Adami, one of several graduate students who has helped realize Zhu’s vision. The new autopilot could be especially useful for pilots of general aviation aircraft, which have a higher accident fatality rate compared to commercial airlines. Many can’t afford today’s autopilot systems, which can make these pilots more prone to fatigue during long flights and increase the risk of mistakes. “Our autopilot will be affordable and functional in virtually any flight condition, and can aid a pilot when he needs it most,” Adami says, explaining that it can provide increased agility and the ability to recover from overcorrections. The student, who plans to test the controller this spring in an unmanned airplane, says that the technology could help the Federal Aviation Administration develop the next generation of airspace, which would feature aircraft that can fly closer together and land more frequently. “If we present the FAA with a technology that can guide an aircraft precisely along a given path,” he says, “that’s going to make it much safer and easier.” Katie Brandt
“Attention needs to be drawn to this. These towns became this way because of short-term, profit-driven thinking. One hundred years later we’re suffering environmental damage.” J E F F L OV E T T
Jeff Lovett exhibited his art work on acid mine drainage at a group show at the Cooper Union in New York City last fall.
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