VaCAS Spotlight
RoMeLa wins at RoboCup 2011
The Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), led by VaCAS core faculty member Dennis Hong, has earned first place titles in RoboCup 2011, an international robot soccer competition.
Both the kid-sized DARwIn robots and the human-sized CHARLI won first place in their respective divisions of the competition. A video of CHARLI's final match is available on YouTube.
Send in the bots
Virginia Tech’s Unmanned System Laboratory is developing a pair of autonomous vehicles that can be deployed quickly in a nuclear danger zone to collect radiation data in blast areas that are not safe for humans.
“This is for a worst-case scenario,” says team leader and lab director Kevin Kochersberger, who is a research associate professor in mechanical engineering and a VaCAS core faculty member. “The idea is to develop portable assets that can be rapidly deployed into areas too dangerous for humans.”
Virginia Tech associate professor, roboticist Dennis Hong to speak at TED2011
VaCAS core faculty member Dennis Hong will speak this March at the TED2011 Conference in Long Beach, Calif. There, he will join the event stage with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Ford Motor Co. Executive Chairman Bill Ford, and Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert.
Hong will focus his March 3 talk on the Blind Driver Challenge project, an effort to allow blind people to one day drive, using non-visual interfaces, as safely as any sighted driver does now.