At its core, engineering is learning how to identify and solve problems. Oftentimes, the solutions to these problems can have life-saving or life-altering outcomes. For Kristin Yvonne Rozier, engineering means seeing puzzles. “I have always loved solving really cool puzzles,” Rozier said. “Find me the coolest, most challenging, amazing, interesting puzzle and I want to get my hands on it. I want to solve it.”
Rozier, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at Iowa State University who began in August, has an eye for viewing problems in aerospace and brainstorming solutions.
She is currently working on several grants and was a 2016 recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. Rozier, who is the third member of the department to have an ongoing CAREER Award, will investigate the theoretical foundations of the challenge of integrating unmanned aerial systems into the national airspace. She will look at how to grow the airspace in a way that it can safely interact with automated aircraft.
Another project, this one from NASA, also deals with unmanned aerial systems. For this grant, Rozier will explore enabling the growth of UAS without being overly restrictive, while keeping safety the main priority. The idea would create an autonomy operating system for UAS with features like we currently have for cell phones. UAS operators would have certain safety features, as well as the ability to write and download apps that would apply to the tasks that the UAS will be asked to accomplish. Rozier imagines a world in which the fire department could download an app that would allow their UAS the capability to do fire surveillance or deliver water and extinguish a fire.
Her NASA Early Career Faculty Award looks at system health management in a broader context of different ranges and types of vehicles in space, such as small satellites and rovers.
Before joining academia, Rozier spent 14 years at NASA in many different capacities. “I had so much fun working in my first job in the wind tunnel,” Rozier said. “I’m playing in a wind tunnel with lasers and they’re paying me for this? Okay!”
It was at the NASA Langley Research Center that she began working with the formal methods group, which remains her main research area. On a broader spectrum, Rozier works with safety-critical systems, which are systems whose failure would cause critical injury or loss of life.
“You need to formally prove critical behavior properties about safety-critical systems,” Rozier said. “You can’t afford to lose an aircraft here or there; that’s not a recoverable failure. You need a different class of methods for reasoning about a safety-critical system than you do for say a non-critical system.”
Not only does the system need to work as expected, but the system should only do what it is programed to do and nothing else. Reasoning formally about what behaviors a system has (or doesn’t have) is a key aspect of formal methods. “In aerospace, there are tons of safety-critical systems so this gets applied all over the place,” Rozier said.
As she begins her career at Iowa State, she looks forward to collaborating with students. “I’ve heard that the students at Iowa State are amazing and I’m looking forward to having them contribute to these projects and seeing what they come up with,” Rozier said. “That’s the fun thing about collaborative research, especially with really creative students.”