A recently posted YouTube video shows a firefighter putting what looks like a toy, but is actually a robot, into a clear testing chamber. He fills the chamber with hydrogen gas, and then gleefully ignites the atmosphere. “You can guess what happens then — there’s a BIG boom,” said Alice Agogino. Agogino, the co-founder and CEO of Squishy …
Fired Up for the Future
As another potentially devastating wildfire season begins, California is facing a shortage of wildland firefighters. To meet this challenge, the Marin County Fire Department and UC Berkeley have partnered to form FIRE Foundry (Fire, Innovation, Recruitment and Education), a program that recruits young adults from underrepresented communities for a career in fire service and trains them on …
National Science Foundation awards $10M to alliance of Native American institutions, UC Berkeley, and UArizona to increase Indigenous participation in higher ed
BERKELEY, CA – August 5, 2021 – The UC Berkeley Blum Center for Developing Economies announced today that a wide range of academic programing around food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) designed by and for Native Americans and other underrepresented student groups will expand substantially as a result of a new $10 million National Science …
Two ME Faculty Recognized for Service to Campus
The Berkeley Faculty Service Award (BFSA) honors a member of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate for their outstanding and dedicated service to the campus, and whose activities as a faculty member have significantly enhanced the quality of the campus as an educational institution and community of scholars. This award recognizes Senate service, which …
ME Professors Alice Agogino and Oliver O’Reilly to Receive 2021 Berkeley Faculty Service Award
ME Professors Alice Agogino and Oliver O’Reilly are the co-recipients of the 2021 Berkeley Faculty Service Award (BFSA). The BFSA honors a member of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate for their outstanding and dedicated service to the campus, and whose activities as a faculty member have significantly enhanced the quality of the campus …
Berkeley ME Group Wins Best Paper Award at ASME Design Conference
UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering faculty (Alice Agogino and Kosa Goucher-Lambert), PhD graduates (Eui-Young Kim, Vivek Rao) and a visiting student from the University of Minnesota (Jieun Kwon) have been recognized for their research paper on decision making about design methods. They won the 2020 Best Paper Award in the Design Theory and Method division at the ASME …
ME Professor Alice Agogino Named Among Top 10 Women in Robotics Industry
Squishy robots are quickly deployable mobile sensing robots for disaster rescue, remote monitoring and space exploration, created from the research at the BEST Lab or Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities Lab. Prof. Alice Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Product Design Concentration Founder and Head Advisor, MEng Program at the University …
ME Professor Alice Agogino Wins 2020 WITI@UC Athena Award for Academic Leadership
A pioneering woman in AI and Machine Learning, the first woman to receive tenure in her field at UC Berkeley, a computer scientist and digital activist challenging bias in decision-making software, and an organization that has introduced 185,000 girls to coding and computer science. The winners of this year’s WITI@UC Athena Awards represent a wide …
Sensor Robots Can Handle Hazardous Situations
The “Squishy Robot” is equipped with six cameras, GPS, and various interchangeable chemical, biological, and radiological sensors that deliver data and 360-degree videos in situations where human access can be difficult or unsafe.
The Squishy Robots That Could Save the World
Two years ago, Alice Agogino, a UC-Berkeley mechanical engineering professor, was working on a contract to build exploratory robots for NASA Ames. She had been recruited to help design what would eventually become a fleet of mobile, ultra-impact-resistant, remote-sensing robots that could protect sensitive scientific equipment during a drop from orbit onto the surface of …
Squishy Robotics at TechCrunch
Squishy Robotics was invited to demo at TechCrunch Robotics+AI on Thursday 18, 2019.
A look at Berkeley-based startup Squishy Robotics and campus startup resource Bear Founders
Every morning, Douglas Hutchings arrives at the SkyDeck building in Downtown Berkeley and attends a stand-up meeting in which team members give a blurb about projects they are working on. Afterward, Hutchings heads to a table in the common area overlooking the UC Berkeley campus. A self-described caffeine addict, he often settles down to work …
Million Hands
“Million Hands,” a 2017 CITRIS seed-funded project that aims to build an open-source platform for customizable, functional, and low-cost prosthetic hands, has been making progress in developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands with more robust capability.
Alice Agogino: Diversity by Design
by Berkeley ENGINEERING Special Edition: 150 Years of Berkeley Engineering Luminaries Fittingly, Alice Agogino’s research group — the BEST Lab Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities/Energy and Sustainable Technologies/Expert Systems Technologies Lab, is an amalgam of research reflecting her wide-ranging expertise and interests. The only thing the lab lacks in its name is Agogino’s reputation as a …
ME Professor Alice Agogino Wins Top U.S. Award for Mentoring
by Julianna Fleming, Berkeley ENGINEERING Mechanical engineering professor Alice Agogino has been named winner of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring PAESMEM, the government’s highest honor for mentors who have worked to expand talent in science, technology, engineering and mathematics STEM. The award was announced this week by the White House Office …
ME Professor Alice Agogino Wins 2017 ASME Design Theory and Methodology Award
Sponsored by the ASME Design Engineering Division, ME Professor Alice Agogino was awarded the 2017 Design Theory and Methods Award. The award recognizes “sustained and meritorious contributions to research education service training of researchers or practitioners overall leadership in advancing the field or any combination of these in the field of Design Theory and Methodology.” …
ME Professor Alice Agogino and Grace O’Connell Awarded CITRIS Seed Funding for Their Work on 3D Printed Prosthetic Hands
ME Professors Alice Agogino and Grace O’Connell have been awarded the CITRIS and the Banatao Institute’s 2017 Core Seed Funding. The funding was awarded for their project “Million Hands: Prosthetic Hands for Children Through and Open Source Platform, 3D Printers and Sensors.” With this project, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Davis will …
ME Professor Alice Agogino and ME Ph.D. students Rachel Dzombak and Julia Kramer Discuss Development Engineering
Impact Design Hub, “”an online resource for architects, designers, makers, and others committed to designing a better world,”” recently sat down with ME Professor Alice Agogino and ME Ph.D. students Rachel Dzombak and Julie Kramer to discuss their point of view on Development Engineering. Agogino is the Chair of the Development Engineering Graduate Group at the …
‘Development Engineering Program, Led by ME Professor Alice Agogino, Awarded $3 Million from NSF’
Story originally published on October 19, 2016 in the Berkeley News   Development Engineering awarded $3 million from National Science Foundation By Brett Israel, Media relations   The National Science Foundation has awarded $3 million to UC Berkeley’s Development Engineering program to create new models for training graduate students to find innovative solutions to food, energy …
ME Doctoral Graduate Euiyoung Kim Wins 2016 Best Paper Award at the 2016 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference
ME Doctoral graduate Euiyoung Kim, along with his co-authors Jaewoo Chung, ME Teaching Professor Sara Beckman, and ME Professor Alice Agogino, won the 2016 Best Paper Award at the 2016 American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ International Design Engineering Technical Conference. The topic of the paper, titled “Design Roadmapping: A Framework and Case Study of Planning …
ME Professor Alice Agogino’s BEST Lab Featured on the Discovery Channel
The BEST Lab‘s tensegrity robot research was recently featured on the Discovery Channel’s nightly science magazine, the Daily Planet. The feature contrasted their sleek and faster Rev3 of the Berkeley Tensegrity Robot with Rev1. Both Rev1 and Rev2 use elastic cords and linear actuators to shape shift the tensegrity robot into punctuated rolling motion. Rev3 …
ME Professor Alice M. Agogino Honored by ASME for Furthering Engineering Design Education
Contact: Mel Torre Phone: 212 591-8157 Email: torrem@asme.org Online: www.asme.org FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Alice M. Agogino, Ph.D., a resident of Berkeley, Calif., and Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California UC, Berkeley, was honored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers ASME. She was recognized for tireless efforts in …
ME Professor Alice Agogino’s BEST Lab’s Shape-Shifting Robots Featured on KQED
Alice Agogino is a mechanical engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and she and her lab are among a group of engineers that are designing what might be the next generation of space exploring robots. These don’t look like the Mars rovers with the big wheels that you may be thinking of– oh no, …
ME Professor Alice Agogino’s Shape-Shifting Robots Featured on KQED Quest
Have you ever seen a skeleton held together with wire in a classroom or at a museum? What would happen if you removed the wire? All of the bones would fall into a heap on the floor! In reality, there are no wires within our bodies. Instead, our bodies are held together with ligaments and soft tissue. …
‘ME Professor Alice Agogino Named an “Engineering Trailblazer” by UC Berkeley’
UC Berkeley calls ME Professor Alice Agogino an “”engineering trailblazer,”” and talks with her about gender, minorities and STEM for social justice in this latest article featured on the Berkeley.edu homepage. The article quotes Professor Agogino as saying, “”When I started at Berkeley, I would occasionally have classes in which there not a single woman. In required classes, there …
ME Professor Alice Agogino & Students Win Best Paper Awards at ICED15
Congratulations to ME Professor Alice Agogino, and her students, on winning two Reviewer’s Favourite “”Best Paper”” Awards at this year’s International Conference on Engineering Design! Professor Agogino presented a paper on Euiyoung Kim’s doctoral research, “Design Roadmapping: Challenges and Opportunities” by Euiyoung Kim, Shun Yao, and Agogino. The paper won the first Reviewers’ Favourite Award, which are the top 10% of reviewed …
Alice Agogino in the Special Design Issue of Berkeley ENGINEER
“”What are we designing? Are we designing for those in extreme poverty? Are we designing for the human condition? I hope so, and I hope that becomes part of the Jacobs Institute story.”” –ME Professor Alice Agogino in the Special Design Issue of Berkeley ENGINEER.
Grant awarded from Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study
ME Professor Alice Agogino, along with Dr. Sohyeong Kim and Professor Henry Chesbrough from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, recently won a grant from the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study. This award will seed research on “Open Innovation in Food Innovation and Design: Comparative Case Study of California Cuisine and New Nordic Cuisine.