The Science and Engineering Library at UCSD will for the next year be prominently featuring prototypes of the unique, and patent-pending, Switchblade and iceCube designs, courtesy of the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab. Do swing by and take a peek!
The UCSD Flow Control Lab, together with Curt Schurgers, Ryan Kastner, Michele Zorzi, and Jules Jaffe, just won a major ($1.2M) new NSF grant on Networked Sensor Swarms of Underwater Drifters. In this project, we will further refine our novel new algorithms to control the topology of formations of underwater vehicles via buoyancy control (only). As illustrated in the plot at the right, by strategically controlling the depth of each drifter in a stratified flow system, the drifters can be made to ``go with the flow'' at each respective depth in a very deliberate fashion, thereby achieving a remarkable degree of control authority over the topology of the swarm in this very low power, significantly "under-actuated" setting.
Prof. Haoxiang Luo, one of the founding PhD students of the UCSD Flow Control Lab and now an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University, received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award. The five year grant, entitled Flapping In The Wind - Passive Mechanisms In Insect Wings For Flight Stabilization, will support his research on computational modeling of insect flight physics, with application to the development of biomimetic micro air vehicles. Congratulations Prof. Luo!
We recently sat down with an editor at the Next Big Future blog site for an far-ranging interview. The transcript of this interview is avialble here.
A huge thanks to Ben Sams for the cools new lab signs! Darth Gubbe strikes back.
The Coordinated Robotics Lab handed off half of our Switchblade vehicle fleet to Jeannie Falcon and Andy Chang at National Instruments at NI Week 2010, kicking off the next stage of our already productive collaboration. These vehicles will be used by NI field representatives to show off the unique capabilites of the NI hardware and software as implemented on the Switchblade vehicles.
An army of advanced Switchblade robots designed & created by the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab infiltrated a parking lot at UCSD and explored clouds of (inert, non-toxic) colored smoke set off in a controlled test. Equipped with high-tech sensor packs and electronics, the robots measured smoke concentrations and wind velocities as they moved. The measurements were transmitted in real time (via wifi and 3g cellular data links) to an off-site supercomputer running advanced weather-forecasting type algorithms pioneered by the UCSD Flow Control Lab. These algorithms, in turn, synchronized a numerical simulation of the smoke plume with the actual measurements taken in the field in real time (a problem known as
data assimilation), then told the vehicles where to move next in order to minimize the uncertainty of the
forecast (a problem known as adaptive observation).
The goal of the system, which was successfully realized in the experiment, was to forecast where the smoke was going to go, as precisely as possible, before it got there, while coordinating the vehicles in real time to collect the most valuable information possible for the particular wind conditions present during that test.
The test was covered live by many media outlets, one of the most dynamic being the live coverage performed by
KUSI.
For a more technical description, please click here.
Because frames are so two-thousand-"late"...
Please bear with us as we insert various new material into this site (it has over 50 subpages, so this might take a while...).
Press release here.
