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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available August 2, 2026
  2. In the post-COVID era, many early educational stakeholders have expressed worryover children9s loss of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) opportunities, with hopes to correctfor this through formal instruction. However, in this paper we invited children to interpret avideo of their own play and we observed the emotional labor that they engaged in, especiallythrough their ability to take on the perspective of other group members. This emotional labor,which we call relationality, appeared to be especially humanizing for Quentin, a Black boy, andthe ways that he played and engaged with others. This work hopes to recognize the SELresources that children already bring to school, and offer an example of how these resourcesshow their ability to see one another. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 10, 2026
  3. Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid rods and flexible cables, exhibit high strength-to-weight ratios and significant deformations, which enable them to navigate unstructured terrains and survive harsh impacts. They are hard to control, however, due to high dimensionality, complex dynamics, and a coupled architecture. Physics-based simulation is a promising avenue for developing locomotion policies that can be transferred to real robots. Nevertheless, modeling tensegrity robots is a complex task due to a substantial sim2real gap. To address this issue, this paper describes a Real2Sim2Real (R2S2R) strategy for tensegrity robots. This strategy is based on a differentiable physics engine that can be trained given limited data from a real robot. These data include offline measurements of physical properties, such as mass and geometry for various robot components, and the observation of a trajectory using a random control policy. With the data from the real robot, the engine can be iteratively refined and used to discover locomotion policies that are directly transferable to the real robot. Beyond the R2S2R pipeline, key contributions of this work include computing non-zero gradients at contact points, a loss function for matching tensegrity locomotion gaits, and a trajectory segmentation technique that avoids conflicts in gradient evaluation during training. Multiple iterations of the R2S2R process are demonstrated and evaluated on a real 3-bar tensegrity robot. 
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  4. Picking an item in the presence of other objects can be challenging as it involves occlusions and partial views. Given object models, one approach is to perform object pose estimation and use the most likely candidate pose per object to pick the target without collisions. This approach, however, ignores the uncertainty of the perception process both regarding the target’s and the surrounding objects’ poses. This work proposes first a perception process for 6D pose estimation, which returns a discrete distribution of object poses in a scene. Then, an open-loop planning pipeline is proposed to return safe and effective solutions for moving a robotic arm to pick, which (a) minimizes the probability of collision with the obstructing objects; and (b) maximizes the probability of reaching the target item. The planning framework models the challenge as a stochastic variant of the Minimum Constraint Removal (MCR) problem. The effectiveness of the methodology is verified given both simulated and real data in different scenarios. The experiments demonstrate the importance of considering the uncertainty of the perception process in terms of safe execution. The results also show that the methodology is more effective than conservative MCR approaches, which avoid all possible object poses regardless of the reported uncertainty. 
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  5. Thermal comfort and energy efficiency are always the two most significant objectives in HVAC operations. However, for conventional HVAC systems, the pursuit of high energy efficiency may be at the expense of satisfactory thermal comfort. Therefore, even if centralized HVAC systems nowadays have higher energy efficiency than before in office buildings, most of them cannot adapt the dynamic occupant behaviors or individual thermal comfort. In order to realize high energy efficiency while still maintain satisfactory thermal environment for occupants indoors, the integrated hybrid HVAC system has been developed for years such as task-ambient conditioning system. Moreover, the occupant-based HVAC control system such as human- in-the-loop has also been investigated so that the system can be adaptive based on occupant behaviors. However, most of research related to personalized air-conditioning system only focuses on field-study with limited scale (i.e. only one office room), this paper has proposed a co- simulation model in energyplus to simulate the hybrid cooling system with synthetic thermal comfort distributions based on global comfort database I&II. An optimization framework on cooling set-point is proposed with the objective of energy performance and the constraints of thermal comfort distribution developed by unsupervised Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clustering and kernel density estimation (KDE). The co-simulation results have illustrated that with the proposed optimization algorithm and the hybrid cooling system, HVAC demand power has decreased 5.3% on average with at least 90% of occupants feeling satisfied. 
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  6. We present the first measurement of cosmic-ray fluxes of Li 6 and Li 7 isotopes in the rigidity range from 1.9 to 25 GV. The measurements are based on 9.7 × 10 5 Li 6 and 1.04 × 10 6 Li 7 nuclei collected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station from May 2011 to October 2023. We observe that over the entire rigidity range the Li 6 and Li 7 fluxes exhibit nearly identical time variations and, above 4 GV , the time variations of Li 6 , Li 7 , He, Be, B, C, N, and O fluxes are identical. Above 7 GV , we find an identical rigidity dependence of the Li 6 and Li 7 fluxes. This shows that they are both produced by collisions of heavier cosmic-ray nuclei with the interstellar medium and, in particular, excludes the existence of a sizable primary component in the Li 7 flux. Published by the American Physical Society2025 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 1, 2026