The Vertical Flight Society Announces the Winners of the Inaugural Design-Build-Vertical-Flight Student Competition
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The Vertical Flight Society announces the winners of its inaugural Design-Build-Vertical-Flight (DBVF) Competition. The University of Michigan took first place, University of Maryland took second and the Ohio State University took third place.
The Michigan Vertical Flight Technology Team from University of Michigan won 1st place in the inaugural VFS Design-Build-Vertical-Flight Student Competition. U. Michigan photo.
“All of the student teams did really impressive work,” said VFS Executive Director Mike Hirschberg. “Not only did they come up with exciting aircraft designs that had to meet the demanding competition requirements, they also had to deal with all the restrictions and uncertainty caused by COVID-19.
ROTC Cadet Part of Team Earning Technology Transfer Innovation Award
Operationalizing Science for Transformational Products Serving the U.S. Military
May 25, 2021
This past summer, WPI mechanical engineering student and
ROTC Cadet Spencer Tess ’21 opted for an internship over a traditional summer break. With his scheduled ROTC stint at Fort Knox cancelled due to the pandemic, he decided to pursue an internship with the Department of Defense.
Leveraging
from Higher Education, Government, Private Industry Partnerships
Tess was part of a team co-led by DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and Soldier Center, commonly referred to as Natick Labs, industry partners Sherpa 6 and Creative Engineering, and WPI’s Army ROTC Bay State Battalion. Together they spent eight weeks developing and demonstrating a process dubbed Very Early Product Realization (VEPR T2), a suite of tools that accelerates the development of products from new discoveries.
This Future Army Battlefield Wound Treatment Gels With Elegant Simplicity forbes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forbes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Credits: Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT
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Sometimes, one robot isn’t enough.
Consider a search-and-rescue mission to find a hiker lost in the woods. Rescuers might want to deploy a squad of wheeled robots to roam the forest, perhaps with the aid of drones scouring the scene from above. The benefits of a robot team are clear. But orchestrating that team is no simple matter. How to ensure the robots aren’t duplicating each other’s efforts or wasting energy on a convoluted search trajectory?
MIT researchers have designed an algorithm to ensure the fruitful cooperation of information-gathering robot teams. Their approach relies on balancing a tradeoff between data collected and energy expended which eliminates the chance that a robot might execute a wasteful maneuver to gain just a smidgeon of information. The researchers say this assurance is vital for robot teams’ success in complex, unpredictable environments. “Our method