Dry weather dominates several U.S. states, and some of them experience even long-term droughts. Yet, more than 10.6 million swimming pools exist in the U.S., and over 43,000 of them are in greater Los Angeles. Since roughly 100% of their water evaporates on a yearly basis, pool water evaporation accounts for a significant amount of water being wasted every day. Several studies have been conducted to create a proper equation for the evaporation rate on a pool surface, based on the wind speed, water temperature, and relative humidity. This thesis will address a research gap that was found in exploring the way the surroundings of the pool can affect its evaporation rate. In particular, this study examines the relation of the urban design to the evaporation rate of outdoor swimming pools by studying the way the housing type of a neighborhood affects the wind speed over the neighborhood’s pool surfaces.

This thesis investigates the passive magnetic latching mechanism designs for autonomous aerial grasping and programmable self-assembly. The enormous latching potential of neodymium magnets is a well-established fact when it comes to their ability to interact with ferrous surfaces in particular. The force of attraction or repulsion among the magnets is strong enough to keep the levitation trains, and high speed transportation pods off the rails. But such utilization of these desirable magnetic properties in commercial applications, comes at a cost of high power consumption since the magnets used are usually electromagnets. On the other hand, we explore some useful robotic applications of passive (and hence low cost) magnetic latching; which are of vital importance in autonomous aerial transportation, automated drone-based package deliveries, and programmable self-assembly and self-reconfigurable systems. We propose, and implement a novel, attach/detach mechatronic mechanism, based on passive magnetic latching of permanent magnets for usBots; our indige- nously built programmable self-assembly robots, and show that it validates the game theoretic self-assembly algorithms. Another application addressed in this thesis is the utilization of permanent magnets in autonomous aerial grasping for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). We present a novel gripper design for ferrous objects with a passive magnetic pick up and an impulse based drop. For both the applications, we highlight the importance, simplicity and effectiveness of the proposed designs while providing a brief comparison with the other technologies out there.