The Michigan Robotics Newsletter, Summer 2019
Welcome to ISSUE 2 of the Michigan Robotics Newsletter, an easy to skim summary of achievements of fellow faculty and students, past and upcoming events, resources, and anything outside routine programming.
Research
Elliott Rouse and Alejandro Azocar unveiled the Open Source Bionic Leg.
Karthik Designh and Chad Jenkins published their work on improving robot perception among clutter.
Lionel Robert, Jessie Yang, and Dawn Tilbury published research on building trust between driverless cars and their drivers.
Congratulations
New core faculty members: Robert Gregg (ECE), Nima Fazeli (ME, 2020), and Katherine Skinner (NAME, 2021).
New robotics-related faculty members: Andrew Owens (ECE) and Leia Stirling (IOE).
Dmitry Bereson, Jason Corso, SangHyun Lee, Wes McGee, Ken Oldham, and Necmiye Ozay all received promoted.
Stasi Webber received an Autism Alliance Champion Award for a Safe and Happy Home.
Tom Augenstein received an NSF Fellowship as he continues research on controllers for stroke-rehab robots.
Peter Gaskell won the second-ever Robotics Teaching Award for all his work guiding students through ROB 550.
Kevin Lieberman won Grad Student of the Year at the Michigan Difference Student Leadership Awards.
Jeremy Castagno, Prince Kuevor, Matthew Romano, and Ella Atkins won first place at the 2019 Swarm & Search AI Challenge: Firehack.
Video
Eva Mungai, Jessy Grizzle, and Damen Provost talked to All About Ann Arbor about robotics in the Biped Lab.
Ram Vasudevan gave an EECS Control Seminar, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lifting to Infinite Dimensions."
Ross Hartley, Joshua Mangelson, Katherine Skinner, and Mia Stevens, the first set of graduating PhDs, all talked about their research and experience at Michigan.
Ella Atkins and Ram Vasudevan discussed the social implications of AI at a UM ITS Dissonance event.
Ryan Eustice gave an EECS Control Seminar on Toyota's latest automated driving research.
Upcoming events
College Clean-Up on July 18! Robotics is holding a few contests as we prepare to move to the new building. Share photos with @umrobotics.
Past events
STARX held their 2nd annual exoskeleton competition.
FIRST Championships in Detroit was attended by several labs, grads, bots, and teams.
NSBE's 45th Convention was attended by Cassie, MRover, STARX, UM::Autonomy, and many others.
Simon Kim presented the final Robotics Interfaces Seminar of the year on engaging in sensate environments.
Building
The robot playground design, developed by Matais del Campo and Alexa Carlson, was on display at the Vienna Biennale.
Based on responses, the new building will include a rover testing ground with Mars-like soil.
If you have comments on this email or submissions for the next, please send them to dnewms@umich.edu.
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