MAE Highlights
April 14, 2021
UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab Provides Key Technology for Consumer Robot
UCSD rings up sale in toy market
Thomas Bewley, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the director of the coordinated robotics lab at UCSD, developed much of the technology that powers, balances and controls MiP, a toy robot that's being introduced by WowWee. — Howard Lipin
UC San Diego is learning that making money can be child’s play.
April 14, 2021
Former UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab student wins BIG in DARPA Robotics Challenge
Professor Bewley's former student, Dr. Chris Schmidt Wetekam, the first PhD graduate of the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab, and now a member of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), was an integral member of the IHMC Atlas team that placed second at the DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona, winning $1M in prize money. 23 teams teams competed. More info here: http://www.ihmc.us
April 14, 2021
Professor Graeve elected a Fellow of The American Ceramic Society
Congratulations to Olivia Graeve who was elected a Fellow of The American Ceramic Society.
April 14, 2021
**FEATURED ON CNET!** UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab develops new technologies for fire surveillance
The Coordinated Robotics Lab has developed new image processing techniques for characterization of structural fires by small self-righting Segway-like vehicles. This system takes the thermal data taken by the vehicle's infrared camera and maps it onto the 3d scene constructed using the vehicle's stereo RGB cameras, thereby creating a temperature-painted virtual reality as it drives through a smoky building with hot spots and people distributed within it. Click here for an explanatory video.
April 14, 2021
Bob Bitmead receives lifetime achievement award for contributions to control theory
Professor Bitmead fell in love with control theory as a third-year applied mathematics major at the University of Sydney in 1974. This fall, he will head out to San Antonio to receive the Rufus Oldenburger medal, a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, for his significant contributions in the field. Read More.
April 14, 2021
Juan Carlos del Alamo receives the NSF Career Award
Assistant professor Juan C. del Alamo received a prestigious CAREER Award in Fluid Dynamics from the National Science Foundation. The five year grant, entitled "Dynamics of anisotropic fluids: a frontier in intracellular microrheology" will support his group's research on the mechanical behavior of living soft matter.
April 14, 2021
Professor de Callafon helps build cyber-infrastructure to aid wildfire hazard assessment and response
The project, called WIFIRE, starts October 1 and is funded under a three-year grant worth approximately $2.65 million. Participants include researchers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology’s (Calit2) Qualcomm Institute, and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) department at the university’s Jacobs School of Engineering.
April 14, 2021
Dr. Padmini Rangamani selected as a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow
Dr. Padmini Rangamani has been selected as a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computational & Evolutionary Molecular Biology. The Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving nominations for most of the very best early-career scientists from the United States and Canada.
April 14, 2021
Miroslav Krstic elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
Professor Miroslav Krstic has been elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) " for pioneering contributions to PDE control and delay systems, nonlinear and adaptive control, extremum seeking, and applications to fluid flows and autonomous vehicles." Krstic has published 13 papers in ASME's Dynamic Systems and Control Division's (DSCD) flagship Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control and was the plenary speaker at the 2009 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference.
April 14, 2021
New Solar Power Material Converts 90 Percent of Captured Light into Heat
UC San Diego Mechanical Engineering Professor Renkun Chen spray paints a novel material designed that could significantly improve the cost competitiveness of solar energy by converting more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures into heat. Read More