What would it take to connect the University of California’s campuses in Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz with a safe and sustainable system of air taxis, equipped to ferry students, faculty, staff and cargo across Northern California? That’s the question posed by the 2023–24 CITRIS Aviation Prize, the student design competition organized by CITRIS Aviation, a …
UC Berkeley Team Advances Food Systems Research in New $20M NSF Center
A new research center funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will aim to improve U.S. food systems to address such issues as pandemic-driven food system security and safety; improving crop yield, quality and nutrition; decreasing energy …
Swappable Flying Batteries Keep Drones Aloft Almost Forever
Battery power is a limiting factor for robots everywhere, but it’s particularly problematic for drones, which have to make an awkward tradeoff between the amount of battery they carry, the amount of other more useful stuff they carry, and how long they can spend in the air. Consumer drones seem to have settled around about a …
ME Assistant Professor Mark Mueller and ME PhD Student Nathan Bucki Receive IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award
ME Assistant Professor Mark Mueller and ME PhD student Nathan Bucki received the Best Paper on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Award at the 2019 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Established in 2018, the award recognizes the best paper on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles presented at the conference based …
ME Professor Mark Mueller Receives ABB Research Award 2017
Photo by: Giulia Marthaler ME Assistant Professor Mark Mueller has received the ABB Research Award 2017 for his doctoral thesis on drones. The award, in honor of Hubertus von Gruenberg, is given to outstanding postdocs whose research has specific real-world applications, potential for innovation, and benefits society and the environment. Professor Mueller’s award-winning research focuses …