A few weeks ago I attended the 2019 AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialists Conference (ASC). This was my first major academic conference in grad school and I was there presenting on my research on using neural networks for optimal control with a special focus on their resilience to missed thrust events. Where Was I? The Astrodynamics Specialist…
Space is Hard From ionizing radiation to micrometeoroids, space is a dangerous place. Most spacecraft, when they feel threatened, can autonomously enter into a protective operating mode call safe mode. Different spacecraft do different things in safe mode, but most turn off all non-essential components, like propulsion and the payload, to focus all energy on…
TLDR: The Surface Pro is a great personal laptop replacement, but don’t expect it to replace a workstation. Intro This isn’t going to be a numbers based review. I’m not going to run benchmarks, talk about the screen refresh rate , or rattle off the specs of every component in my Surface Pro. Instead, I’m…
Inverted Pendulum Recap In this post, we’re going to talk a little about how to balance an inverted pendulum on a cart. This is the second post in a 3 part series about balancing an inverted pendulum Part 1 – Balancing an inverted pendulum Part 2 – Swing-Up of an Inverted Pendulum on a Cart…
TLDR I’ve launched a new website that I manage at a much lower level to allow me to explore things like interactive graphics and demonstrations. It’s arirubin.space, and while currently sparse, you should check it out! What I was Looking For To understand the choices I made in setting up arirubin.space, it’s best to start with…
A Quick Estimate A few days ago I was invited to take part in a mock architecture study looking at Deep Space CubeSat missions. As a multi-body dynamics fanboy, my heart jumped at the possibility of using the interplanetary superhighway to preserve our meager delta-V budget. The downside of using the interplanetary superhighway is that…
Robustify Verb To Make More Robust You often lose performance when you choose to robustify something. Missing Words English is a dynamic and ever-evolving language. Unfortunately, it’s finite in size so there are concepts and ideas that even it cannot currently describe. In the missing words series, I’ll be noting words that come up in…
I had a problem. I had trained a model in Keras using a TensorFlow backend. Unfortunately, and for reasons I won’t get into here, I wanted to use that trained model with PyTorch. I couldn’t find a good library to transfer the models whole or a good writeup on how to transfer the weights manually…
Space Debris From dead satellites to flecks of paint, there are over 500,000 pieces of space debris currently being tracked. Space debris, and the problems they can cause is a hot topic with everything from a major Hollywood movie to TED talks being given about them. In this post I’m going to go over a less…
Book Review As a grad student, I read a lot of papers. For some reason, I like to relax by reading more. This post will be a review of 3 books that I’ve read whose authors are from academia. Below a each review, I give my recommendations for it to both a lay audience and…
