Timothy Havens

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, commonly called drones) are all over the news, from conflict overseas to future plans for delivering parcels. ECE’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory—directed by Tim Havens—is aiming high in this field by giving a bird’s-eye view to bridge inspectors and keeping soldiers safe from the threat of explosive hazards. Havens joined Michigan Tech in Fall 2012 as the William and Gloria Jackson Assistant Professor of Computer Systems and holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science.

After receiving his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Tech in 1999 and 2000, Havens then spent five years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory working on simulation and modeling of directed energy systems and global positioning systems (GPS). He went on to receive his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Missouri in 2010. Prior to joining Tech, he was a National Science Foundation (NSF)/Computing Research Association (CRA) Computing Innovation Fellow at Michigan State University, where he developed machine learning methods for  heterogeneous and big data.

“It is a dream-come-true to return to Michigan Tech and give back to the program that gave me so much,” he says. “I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but my education here was top-notch. At Lincoln Labs I was able to compete on the same playing field as graduates from programs like MIT and Illinois. This was a real eye-opener for how good my Tech education was.”

Funding for UAV research comes from the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) and a Michigan Tech Research Excellence Fund award. “UAVs have recently attracted both good and bad media attention,” says Havens. “While drone hunting licenses, as proposed in a small town in Colorado, may make a catchy headline, the real story is that micro aerial vehicles are going to revolutionize industries in both commercial and public sectors. Photographers now have the capability to shoot from the air without renting time on an expensive helicopter, and they can get into locations that a helicopter simply cannot. But it doesn’t stop there. We plan to look at how UAVs can be used to track plumes from power plants, measure the composition of ash clouds from volcanoes, and inspect all kinds of infrastructure.”

The lab is also researching how UAVs can be made autonomous: choosing paths, avoiding obstacles, and deciding how to best achieve assigned goals.

“We are really pushing the envelope, discovering how groups of autonomous UAVs can work together to provide better information than a single UAV,” says Havens. “This is made possible by major advances in electronics miniaturization, battery technology, and microcomputing hardware. Our drones carry multiple miniature computers, which are a thousand times faster than the desktop computer I had in high school. They can also communicate with our supercomputer here on campus, sharing information and processing it in real-time. It is really exciting stuff.”

Havens is also working on two projects funded by the US Army involving the detection of buried explosives with ground-penetrating radar and other sensors.

“The idea is to use sensors, allowing soldiers to stay far away from hazards,” he says. “The farther away a hazard is, the tougher it is to detect. We are integrating machine learning and signal processing to build an end-to-end solution for creating high-quality radar images and developing autonomous detection algorithms for finding buried hazards. This research is really satisfying, both technically and personally; it is motivating to think that the better we do, the more lives this technology could save.

"The Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (IRL) is also made up of exceptional undergraduate and  graduate students working under the direction of Havens. “I had expectations that my students were going to be good,” he said. “But I have been blown away by how great the students are that I get to work with. They are creative and smart, and there is a real drive in the undergraduates to get involved with research, a vital part of their experience.”

Havens’s research work has earned him the best paper award at FUZZ–IEEE 2012, the IEEE Franklin V. Taylor Memorial Award for best paper at IEEE SMC 2011, and the best journal paper award from the Midwest Nursing Research Society in 2009. He has published more than fifty technical articles. Havens is a senior member of the IEEE and is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.

“Tim is the quintessential teacher-scholar,” notes ECE chair Dan Fuhrmann. “He is building a cutting-edge research program that attracts the attention of funding agencies and is getting students excited. At the same time, he is capable of bringing that excitement into the classroom. He has taught our sophomore-level course in digital logic and a graduate-level course in computational intelligence, and received fantastic student evaluations in both. We’re lucky to have him.”