- (8/29/2018) GRANT FROM DARPA: We have been awarded a 16-month $624,000 grant from DARPA Biological Technology Office for an exciting new interdisciplinary project at UCR! Our team consists of A. Ray (PI) and A. Dahanukar from the Molecular, Cell and Systems Biology Department, and K. Karydis and A. Roy-Chowdhury from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. The project innovates on the genetic engineering of insects to snif landmines and IEDs, the automated capture-release and transportation of such insects to remote areas of interest via aerial robots, and the joint biological and vision-based tracking of landmines.
- (6/14/2018) PAPER ACCEPTED TO IEEE SSRR 2018: One paper entitled "Minimalistic Neural Network Architectures for Safe Navigation of Small Mobile Robots" has been accepted to the 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR). Congratulations Xinyue!!!!
- (5/26/2018) SEED GRANT AWARD: We have been awarded $65,000 from UCR's Office of Research and Economic Development (RED) Collaborative Seed Grant program to study the design and control of impact-tolerant micro aerial vehicles. The team includes K. Karydis and D. Kisailus.
- (5/11/2018) WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION: UCR and ARCS Lab organized the 34th Southern California Control Workshop! Next workshop to happen at UCLA in Fall.
- (4/3/2018) TWO GRANTS FROM DoD: We have been awarded two equipment grants from ARO and ONR that exceed $1M. These are: (1) ARO DURIP – PI Karydis (Co-PIs: Roy-Chowdhury, Mourikis, Pasqualetti, Farrell); $350,000 matched with $239,768 from UCR cost-sharing, to build an outdoor motion tracking arena for robotics experimentation. (2) ONR DURIP – PI Roy-Chowdhury (Co-PIs: Karydis, Mourikis, Pasqualetti, Shelton); $428,331, to acquire new robots and necessary computing units for learning-based robot navigation. The two awards complement each other very well, and will greatly elevate the research on robotics, autonomy, and machine intelligence that is conducted at UCR. Specifically, the ARO grant will create a state-of-the art facility to fly UAVs outdoors in a safe and contained area, test ground robots in long missions, and operate autonomous sensor-based navigation in much closer to real-world settings than inside the traditional lab. The ONR grant will allow us to acquire state-of-the-art UAVs and ground (wheeled and legged) robots that can enable new research directions, as well as a new computational cluster to develop machine intelligence which is much needed for modern robotics applications.
- (8/18/2017) GRANT FROM NSF: We have been awarded a 4-year $1M grant from NSF's Smart and Autonomous Systems. Our team consists of Dr. Amit Roy-Chowdhury (PI; Professor; ECE, UCR), Dr. Konstantinos Karydis (Co-PI; Asst. Professor; ECE, UCR), Dr. Qi Zhu (Co-PI; Assoc. Professor; ECE, UCR), Dr. Anastasios Mourikis (Co-PI; Assoc. Professor; ECE, UCR), Dr. Darrel Jenerette (Co-PI; Professor; Botany and Plant Sciences, UCR), and Dr. Nael Abu-Ghazaleh (Senior Personnel; Professor; CSE & ECE, UCR).
- (6/31/2017) TRAVEL GRANT FROM NSF: Dr. Konstantinos Karydis has received $12,000 from NSF's Robust Intelligence program. This grant supports travel expenses for participants to the workshop at RSS that Dr. Karydis co-organizes.