CRUSER Monthly Meetings Provide Opportunities for Engagement
Today@NPS
CRUSER Monthly Meetings Provide Opportunities for Engagement
By MC2 Shawn J. Stewart
U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Louis Batson introduces his thesis research, titled "Unmanned Tactical Autonomous Control and Collaboration (UTACC) Threat and Vulnerability Assessment," during the latest CRUSER monthly meeting, May 18. Open to all students, faculty and staff, the meetings raise cognizance of campus efforts in robotics and unmanned systems, and offer an opportunity to engage on a broad range of topics.
"It's a great opportunity for anyone on campus who is interested in learning about thought-provoking happenings across the CRUSER community of interest," said Systems Engineering Assistant Professor Timothy Chung. "These types of information exchanges allow us to begin innovating in a number of ways … from getting more funding from a sponsor, to the ability to examine innovative things, to identifying interesting thesis topics that may have not arisen."
Associate Professor in the NPS Department of Information Sciences, Dr. Ray Buettner also recognizes the power of an open forum, and believes the monthly meetings can be strengthened with the participation of the enlisted staff.
"Sometimes we are top heavy and missing the point of view of the actual warfighter or end user," said Buettner. "We could learn so many things from each other."
During the meeting, the audience was as much a part of the presentation as the presenter, asking engaged questions on topics that branched into diverse directions. Batson was chosen to speak because his project has gained traction with the Marine Corps and is raising awareness on potential UTACC vulnerabilities.
"The meeting gave me the opportunity to talk about where those vulnerabilities exist and how developed security controls could prevent exploits," he said. "We found that a lot of threats occur in the development stages and [could] become systematic failures throughout … If we don't start looking at and fixing those threats now, we will be faced with billions of dollars worth of mistakes."
CRUSER monthly meeting are open to the entire campus community, for a list of upcoming speakers and topics, or to sign up, go to http://CRUSER.nps.edu.