Conducting Research: A Personal Technical Experience
-Part II: At the National Aeronautical Laboratory
By JIRARA
© JIRARA, August 2022
Published by JIRARA
on matrubharti.com
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Disclaimer: This is the work of fiction as far as all the characters, their names and the names of all the events are concerned and all these are imaginary and hence any resemblance to the persons (and their lives) dead or alive, and any places are coincidental. Even if a few events might look realistic/’real’, these are fictionalised and the associated names are changed in order to maintain their privacy, honour, and security. No intention whatsoever is meant to hurt any feelings of whosoever, irrespective of their personal/cultural beliefs, social or political inclinations, religion-orientations/practicing/philosophy, life styles, and work/business. The ‘I’, ‘my’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’ (if any used) do not necessarily mean the author of this book/story/article, and these and other such pronouns: her, hers, his, he, she, him, you, your, yours, ours, theirs…; are used for effective personification and dramatization, and the readers should not take these on their ‘own persons’.
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The readers should take these stories/verses/thoughts with/in good spirit. The presented ideas and material are based, where feasible, on readings and (thought-) analyses of scientific/other open literature (which seemed most profound and trustworthy), with as much care as possibly taken. The readers are requested to verify these notions on their own, and use their own discretion. However, these stories/verses/thoughts/ideas (mostly original) are expressed here with an intention of increasing awareness of the readers with a hope that in an overall sense, their (and ours) consciousness would be heightened (in all and multiple directions), so that we all can live our lives on this planet with true happiness, ever-lasting peace and real joy (irrespective of our orientations). The author and the publisher will not be responsible for any negative effects/situations arising as a result of reading these stories/verses and/or following the suggestions if any; and no discussions/dispute of any kind will be entertained at any time and in any way, manner, and/or forum; because the dictum is that if you like(-d) you read, otherwise ignore, what is the point in making a fuss about it?; anyway you are independent to judge the messages in the articles/stories and utilize for your benefits if found useful, since here the idea is in the direction of ‘consciousness raising’. JIRARA.
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Conducting Research: A Personal Technical Experience
-Part II: At the National Aeronautical Laboratory
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Preamble: When in 1975 I joined NAL (National Aeronautical Laboratory, Bangalore), I found that the scope of the research had an expanded meaning, it formally included the development, and it was more of R&D (research and development); and it also included lot of experimental research, and development of facilities for conducting such research. The events presented in the following are not necessarily in the chronological order.
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As a Senior Scientific Assistant (SSA from Sept 1975 to June 1977) and as a Scientist B (from July 1977 to Aug 1981).
I was a teaching assistant in the dept. of electrical engg. in the MSU (Vadodara), when I had applied for the position of SSA in NAL, in a response to an advertisement that then had appeared in Indian Express newspaper.
I went to Bangalore by train for the interview, and stayed in the Sudarshan lodge very near to the city railway station, in the so-called majestic area. In the next morning I went to NAL by BTS city bus. At the interview place, I met one more candidate named Sharma (his family name) for the same post, and he had told me that the SSA-post was meant for him, since he had, from Bombay talked to one senior scientist S. Balakrishna who was the coordinator of the control group; this was a great disappointment for me, since even before the interview I felt discouraged; but having had gone there by spending time of some 40 hours, and money, there was no backing off from appearing for the interview. I wanted to read more there, but Mr. Sharma was very talkative, and was not relenting; so, I could not read much; and then we both faced the interview, which was just fair for me. Sharma suggested me that since, he was going to get selected, and that I would not get the post; we go to Mysore for next day’s trip, since we would not meet again; to which I had agreed, and then after the trip I went back to Vadodara.
After five months I got the appointment letter for the post, and I joined NAL’s instrumentation division in September 1975, and was attached to the control activity group coordinated by S. Balakrishna. What happened to that Sharma I had never enquired?
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When I went for joining the position at NAL, I was directed to the administration and to meet one clerk called Sharma, I was first stunned, then reconciled that the interview-Sharma could not be this admin-Sharma anyway! After some formalities I was directed to meet Balakrishna in his chamber who welcomed me to the division, and then after a brief explanation of my role he told: frankly speaking this is a good place to work, however, for say two years the organisation would bother about you, and then for two years you would, then both will forget about each other! I was stunned with his frank statement, which was a bit difficult for me to understand at that time. He then took me to meet some colleagues who were working in his group.
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I started working on studying a gyroscope, supposed to do some experiment as to how it works, and does sensing of the orientation of the platform on which it would be subsequently mounted. Also, was introduced to rigging circuits which would use operational amplifiers (OPAMs, mainly Bur Brown), and potentiometers as sensors of position, etc. I was also asked to program the equations of motion (EOMs) of aircraft, especially lateral-directional ones on AC20 analogue computer (bought from the ECIL, Hyderabad, we had a couple of them), of which I had no clue at all. Gradually, I learnt all these technologies, which were to be used in building flight-research simulator in the division as a part of the in-house (or sponsored one!) R&D project. In the process, I burnt one opam (or more?) and the intermediate boss complained about this to the main boss; this device was costly, and was imported from abroad; so, we were strictly instructed to be very careful and were not allowed any overload or drift in the operation of the AC20; but this lacuna was a demerit of the analogue computers, and it was very difficult to control the drift in the output signal.
It was an arduous task to build the required circuits: first you have to make a plan, and the drawing, then you have to give to another section where the printed circuit board (PCB) will be prepared, and then you have to solder the required components on to this PCB, and then insert it into a slot provided on the back side of the AC20, and then connect to the main program that would have been patched up on the computer, then this program would be the one that would simulate aircraft EOMs, and this assembly would be one subsystem of the entire flight simulator; the latter was designed and built by Balakrishna in house with the help of the NAL’s fabrication workshop (WS); only certain sensors, key instruments, servo valves and actuators were imported; and the PCB circuits were designed to simulate nonlinearities appearing in some EOMs. Ultimately a 3-degrees of freedom (3DOF) motion-based simulator was made ready to conduct experiments on human pilot’s (operator’s) modelling in a compensatory tracking task, and fortunately this major experimental task of conducting the experiments was handed over to me, and I felt really good, and at the same time was a bit scared that if some mishap happened while performing these experiments what will happen to me?
Two Mishaps (not fatal)
a) Once, when I was doing experiments with the 3DOF motion simulator, the platform that had a fibreglass cockpit fixed-mounted on it, with a scientist (as a pilot or an operator) in the cockpit, went to its extreme tilted position, and got stuck there; and I was damn scared and in the fear rushed to another senior scientist and called him for the rescue; who immediately exclaimed: ‘you come to meet me only when you are in trouble and do not even say hello to me at any other times’; I felt bad and yet embarrassed; he went very near to one of the actuator-jacks of the simulator and did something (that I only could guess, but he never told me what to do!), and the simulator platform resumed the normal equilibrium position; then the operator got down with the help of the ladder and blasted me that if Balakrishna had not provided the safety feature in the mechanical structure, he would have been killed or at least severely injured; I was so scared to run the experiments again but I had no other go except doing lot of experiments.
b) Another time, there was demonstration of the simulator to the external reviewers of the project, and the boss had asked me to operate the entire experiment, and when the demo was going on, the AC20 started drifting, and the simulator started to go to extreme, the boss noticed this and alerted me to switch off the demo, which I did and the platform came back to the normalcy; and he explained away this by telling the experts that the analogue computers always have tendency to drift; however the demonstration of the simulator to move in all the three degrees was successfully demonstrated and his project of Rs. 10 lakhs at that time (in 1976-77) was deemed an original work and very successful; perhaps that was the first motion-based simulator indigenously designed, developed, and built for research purpose in the country; other similar motion-based simulators were operating in Bombay and Hyderabad for the training of airline pilots who were required to fly these at least for 20 hours before a pilot takes to flying the real aircraft, say Boing 737.
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We had at that time a TDC 12 (12 digits Trombay digital computer) for processing the data generated from the simulator, and Balakrishna as a part of his doctoral work (external registration at the school of Automation, IISc., Bangalore) had developed a software program to analyse the data (of the type of input/output of a system) and obtain the parameters of the proposed time-series based mathematical models of the activity of a human operator while he was performing a tracking task in the motion-based simulator; the entire activity was very involved one:
i) first, I had to see that all the wired connections are in order, and then the system was powered on,
ii) then hydraulic system and the motor were switched on, and the motion computer was also checked,
iii) the portable rack of the tape recorder and other signal processing units were moved near to the AC20 computer and were connected to record the signals from the experiments,
iv) then the operator, usually a colleague was requested to move into the cockpit and was made ready to operate the stick in front of him to control the motion platform,
v) then, the random signal was switched on that would go to the servo valves which in turn move the jacks and hence the platform randomly, the cockpit being fixed to the platform would be set in the motion, the (error) signal will appear onto the CRO (cathode ray oscilloscope) that is in the front of the operator, who will control the motion of the cockpit by moving to and fro the stick mounted between his two legs, and the gyroscope mounted on the platform would sense its angular movement; and the entire experiment is a huge system that was partly housed on the floor of the building, the simulator bay; and the AC20 computer and signal recording units in the first floor, and I would be conducting the experiments and will be able to oversee the cockpit from the huge glass window from the recording room of the first floor. In a way it was a world class set up, which could be in a place like NASA.
The experiments would last for several days, first practice and trial runs and then the actual runs and then I would push the recorder system to the next room where the TDC computer was housed, and transfer the data to this digital computer, run the software program for analysis of these data, and print out the results.
The entire process to get at least one set of a final result would take nearly a month; and we needed several such sets for obtaining the consistency of the results. The main purpose was to study the effect of the motion cues on the human operator’s control activity, and for which another set of experiment was required to be performed by dismantling the cockpit from the platform and put it on the ground and then the operator will control the platform while this time he is not affected by the motion of the platform but he is operating on the visual cues coming from the CRO that is in the cockpit; during my degree classes and labs I had never heard of such experiments.
After each experiment was conducted, I had to switch off all the systems, in almost the reverse order, and see that all the electrical and electronics were switched off. Except me nobody was allowed to conduct the experiments. After lot of hard work, and nearly after one year (even more) some sensible results had started coming, and that was a great success and relief too for me.
Then, when some sensible results had come, it was required to write an internal report and publish in the division/lab.
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Some unpleasant events
I had joined my first regular job (as SSA) with a first-class Master’s degree with a certain specialization (and with two years of experience as a teaching assistant in the MSU, Vadodara) and yet an intermediate senior used to treat me as if I was a ‘dumb’ guy, and used to subject me to (sometimes odd) questions every day to calibrate my knowledge; this was terribly irritating, and often humiliating, because of his low-mannerisms. This however, compelled me to study more and more of the field for/on which I was working to become familiar and up to date. Eventually, this turned out to be a very rewarding experience for me in a very long run of my professional career; and in the process, in the passage of four decades, I self-studied several difficult engineering subjects, beyond and in addition to the prescribed curriculum of the Universities for my degrees.
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Once or twice, I would have forgotten to switch of lights in our experimental bay, while leaving the office by 5:00 p.m., since I would be in hurry to catch the bus which would then leave at 5:15 p.m.; and if I missed this service provided by NAL, I would have to change the city-buses twice to reach my residence that was nearly 20 Kms. from the office. And this guy repeatedly brought up the same issue day in and out; and rebuked me just because he was (middle-level) senior to me. Incidentally, he used to help me in some of the experiments, and he was required to sit and conduct these as an operator, and I used to record the data in a magnetic tape recorder, and so on. Often, he would tell me to set up an experiment, and ask me to wait for him; and in most cases, he would not be available even after 20 minutes of my waiting for starting the experiment; till then all the equipment, devices, and sensors would be kept on. At times when he would not turn up, I would switch of the experimental setup; and just then he would pop up from nowhere. When I used to question him about this, he would get angry on me, and blame me that I myself was not interested in conducting and completing these experiments!
For nearly two years this circus continued, and the data were generated concurrently from some experiments from a fixed-base simulator wherein there were two controls: i) central stick, and ii) pedals to be moved by the feet; and the responsibility to conduct these experiments was also given to me. In fact, later on I realized that this was done towards his doctoral studies; but eventually he could not complete his degree and had to quit the programme. Of course, he registered elsewhere and completed; and in an overall sense he took nearly eight years to get the degree. And the experiments that I had conducted for him were only partially successful, that only the internal reports could be written, and no technical paper came out of it; the analysis of these data was his own responsibility, and why no sensible results came out, I do not know.
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Preparation of research papers and trying for higher studies abroad
While doing the analysis of the pilot’s input/output data from the motion-based tracking experiments, we could generate enough material to write a technical paper; and this work also gave an idea to me that some more analytical studies could be done, and another paper could be written.
a) Study of effect of motion cues on human operator’s control activity in a manual tracking task: Since, the experimental data were generated with and without motion cues to the human operator, it was thought to discern this effect by doing analysis of the mathematical models generated; for which I studies a lot of relevant literature and I found some good hints for the same; and I applied that logic/procedure to separate these effects on the basis of the models of the operator when he is performing the task: a) once while the platform/cockpit is moving, and b) next, when it is not moving; and I got really very logical and tangible results (this was my original contribution); which were presented by the operator-colleague (also a scientist in the group) at the IFAC conference at Baden, Germany (during this time I had left NAL and had gone to Canada for my doctoral studies); though the colleague had not done any analytical work his name was included in the paper for two reasons: a) he was performing the tracking tasks, and b) he was to be in Germany for his own deputation-work and hence, he would be able to make the presentation of our paper.
Subsequently, the paper was chosen for inclusion in the IFAC’s international journal Automatica, in 1982, and that time I was in Canada doing my doctoral research.
b) Study of several model order selection criteria: As a by-product of the study of human operator modelling in a compensatory pursuit task, and thereby separation of the effect of motion cues on his control activity, I got the idea of studying the techniques of determination of model order in time series modelling from the experimentally acquired data; and then I told this idea to another scientist colleague (RVJ) who agreed with me and then we jointly studied the problem, and did some more experiments on some circuits using AC20, and he did some experiments in NAL’s wind tunnel and then from these gathered data, I/we generated the results.
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I had not revealed this piece of study to the boss, but he came to know about it; another scientist who knew about my activity had revealed it; and then the boss asked what was wrong with his concept of selecting model order, whereupon I had said that there was nothing wrong, but always a higher order model was selected, and by my study it was found that only 3rd order model was sufficient; then he said he was not sure that I would be successful or not, but he told me to continue to pursue the study.
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Eventually, my colleague RVJ took all the details and the results from me, and wrote the paper, that was submitted to the IEEE Transaction on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, USA; and later on, came with some comments from three reviewers. Then with the discussions with another senior boss (Dr. S. Srinathkumar, SSK), the paper was revised and resubmitted, and it was accepted and was published in 1982; at that time, I was in McMaster University.
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During this period of our writing two papers our first boss had gone to USA (~1977-1979) and was working on some NASA sponsored project, while perhaps with some NRI’s private company. To bid farewell to him the entire unit of control activity group (of the then Instrumentation division of NAL) had gone to the airport which was then 3 kms away from the NAL’s premises. In his absence, a senior colleague from another group used to monitor our progress. But, within a short time Dr. S. Srinathkumar, who was earlier with the Instrumentation division, had returned back to NAL and had joined in an adhoc position, and was directly supervising our activity; he had a Ph.D. from USA, and had worked on NASA’s NRC (national research council) project on helicopter control design and synthesis, mainly using eigenvalue-eigenvector approach which was a time domain procedure within the ambit of the systems engineering field; and for several years he kept on talking about it, and especially of xdot equal to a x plus b u (xdot=Ax+Bu)! He took keen interest in my work, and had guided us how to revise the ms of the paper that was reviewed by the IEEE SMC reviewers.
He was very active, and had an open mind, and used to follow the dictum of ‘agree to disagree’ when we used to discuss many technical aspects related to our work. He had some other peculiar characteristics: i) when we have had discussed something with him, then he would say thank you, and again and again, in total three times; he later on explained that it meant we have to quit his office; and ii) he would ask funny questions which sounded illogical; and when we had explained our results very well to him, he would say all that was wrong!, so we had to explain him more and with better arguments; he later on told us that by this method he would become more confident in our work, and he also would learn many things in a simpler way!
He also used to tell us that as a scientist we have to work at least 16 hours in a day.
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We were apprehensive of works of some other colleagues of the group and found that we were doing lot of work, and those people used to be in lime light; then, another friendly scientist and I had approached the new boss, and argued that these people be separated from the mainstream; however, at the same time there was a need to merge several projects and run only a few ones from our group; since earlier we had so many inhouse projects, for every scientist there was one project and he/she was a project leader and had a team of one or two assistants; this was a policy and style of Dr. Balakrishna (who had got his Ph.D. before going to USA, and he had believed that by his style each scientist would be motivated to do something and contribute since he would be in charge of the project). So, then the new boss kept only three projects for the group, for one I was the project leader, for the other Dr. R. V. Jategaonkar (RVJ), and for the third he himself was the project leader, and under him he put all the senior and junior scientists as team members; and this exercise though was necessitated by the new policy of the laboratory, was not liked by our seniors, and perhaps that was a beginning of a ‘soft’ animosity at least towards me.
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My bosses had encouraged me to go abroad for doing the Ph.D., and had assured that if I came back with a good degree, they would take me back and give a higher position. So, since the study leave was not feasible for me, I had resigned from NAL and had gone to Canada and had joined McMaster University in Hamilton. A farewell party was given to me with a good memento designed by my senior colleague Mr. Rajmurthy, who himself was an artist besides being an aero engineer and expert scientist in the area of flight mechanics. Till to date, I am having this peace that was in a sandal wood frame and with some writeup of the contributions that I had made to the group’s technical activity during last six years then.
When I took a flight from Bangalore airport to Bombay, perhaps on 31 August 1981, Mr. P. T. Varute (PTV), a hydraulics man, and another scientist Mr. V. S. Mohan Ram (VSM) had come to bid a farewell to me; and incidentally none of these were working with me and in my field of activity. Before going to abroad, I had a privilege to stay with Mr. VSM in his house for one week, and I had also a dinner with Mr. PTV’s family before going to the airport.
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How I became scientist B?
Dr. V. N. Subba Rao (VNS, who was earlier with NAL, and then had gone to do his Ph.D. to USA) had returned for a short while to NAL, maybe he was to be interviewed for some higher position, and for that he wanted to borrow the book System Identification authored by Dr. R. C. Desai (who was my M. E. thesis guide back at the MSU, Vadodara), and he was surprised that I was a SSA with M.E. degree with first class, and then he talked to the boss, who asked me to apply for the position of scientist B for which the advertisement had just come; and I told that the last date was over, but he had said it did not matter.
I was perhaps, only one of one or two candidates for the interview, and I got selected for the position, and I had joined in the new position on 7 July 1977. Many years later, I had just remembered this incident, and I had described this small episode in the acknowledgment of my technical book, and then had sent the piece to Prof VNS by email attached file, and he felt very happy and he wrote back to me that he did what he felt right at that time; VNS expired one year later; however, I had felt good that I could convey my thanks to him.
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Some ups and downs
a) Of the simulator activity of the control group of the Instrumentation division of NAL:
Once, Air Marshall Latif (Indian Air Force service) had visited our simulator facility and since he was very much impressed with the functioning of the indigenously designed and built 3DOF motion-based simulator; he had suggested that since the Indian Air Force needed two simulators, one should be built by ADE (Aeronautical Development Establishment, Bangalore) and the other to NAL. However, due to some political or strategic reasons, NAL did not get the contract; may be because the ADE is/was a defence R&D laboratory.
b) Personal aspects:
i) One project assistant, called as JSA (junior scientific assistant) was assigned to me to help me in wiring the circuits and conducting experiments, but he would rarely come in time when called for the help, he used to dodge and when enquired with him he would tell that he was partly assigned to me, and for the major part he was assigned to another scientist and mostly he would be busy with his work; in fact, he was discouraged to help me as much as possible.
Once, when I was going from the simulator building to the main building, a JSA halted me on the way and started giving me a warning and even threat, and told me that I should stop harassing the previous JSA; whereupon I had said that I was not doing anything to him, on the contrary he was dodging his duties to me, and was not even correcting his mistakes, and so on; but still that well-wisher of this JSA relentlessly kept arguing with me, then I had gotten upset with him and had said: if a ‘dog’ is behaving badly, then it is my duty to rebuke it; and then the guy kept quite and went away, and for years to come he never faced me; except for an apology to me after several years later on.
ii) Another JSA was also assigned to me, and he also used to do the same thing to me; and one day he happened to come to my house while on the way going to his own residence, confided in me that the same senior scientist had point blank told him that he should not help me at all in my work. But, the JSA still assured me that he would continue to assist me in whenever and whatever way he could, irrespective of the instructions from his senior guy.
(Despite these two JSAs not helping in my technical work regularly, even though it was their assigned duties, when they wanted some money, I had loaned to them, which they had returned to me in a process of long time and on my repeated demands!).
iii) Once, a newly joined lady scientist had some requirement that the simulator experiment be demonstrated to her to help her in understanding certain aspects of the flight simulator, since eventually she was hired to focus and develop more sophisticated flight simulator for the division, and hence in NAL; then I requested her to switch on the hydraulics, and she flatly refused saying that it was not her job, an assistant be called upon to do that; eventually I did that as I always used to do as a SSA and as a Scientist B; when it came to doing any technical work, I never brought up any kind of status and ego aspects into my arena.
I had gulped all these and some more similar nonsensical aspects of working in a team, and I had never bothered and never even complained about these to any of my senior bosses; for me the goal of the group and research work was more important than engaging in the gossips, and making big issues of small things.
I believed over a period of those six years, I learnt lot of aspects of technical management, leadership, tolerance, designing of circuits for simulating nonlinearities, deeper analysis of the data, programming techniques, practical aspects of system identification, interpretations of the results, writing technical reports & papers for international conferences/journals, and more importantly I gained confidence in handling huge experimental system like flight simulator, and conducting research on my own without any guidance from individual. It was an exhilarating and technically very rewarding experience. I consider that, directly or indirectly, all the people of the group, including the hydraulic section led by M. Ishwar, and an electronic engineer Mr. T. Niranjan, contributed to my technical development and progress at the NAL.
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