UCSD Coordinated Robotics: from ideation, to prototype, to IP, to market

Professor Thomas R. Bewley, UCSD Flow Control & Coordinated Robotics Labs, will discuss how robotics is being radically transformed by modern cellphone electronics and software, 3D design tools, 3D printing, custom printed circuit board fabrication, and crowdfunding. We will explore how situational awareness and feedback control can help small, simple vehicles overcome large, complex obstacles, and how new algorithms for coordinating squads of agile robotic vehicles can help protect human life, grow food, and better respond to environmental hazards like fires, contaminant plumes, and hurricanes.

Professor Bewley currently works at the intersection of semi-autonomous agile robotics and the analysis, estimation, and forecasting of environmental flows using advanced control theory and numerical methods. His Coordinated Robotics Lab is developing an array of clever vehicles to achieve maximum agility with minimal complexity, and is coming to market with a number of small toy and educational robotic vehicles in collaboration with WowWee Robotics. His Flow Control Lab is developing new algorithms for weather-forecasting class problems like state estimation and adaptive observation in environmental contaminant plumes, and in-situ monitoring of developing hurricanes using buoyancy-controlled balloons. In short, Prof Bewley’s team is exploring how situational awareness and feedback control can help small, simple vehicles overcome large, complex obstacles, and how new algorithms for coordinating squads of agile robotic vehicles can help grow food, protect human life, and better respond to environmental hazards.