Scott Niekum - along with three other UTCS professors—Vijay Chidambaram, Simon Peter, and Eric Price—have won the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development award for 2018.

Dr. Andrea Thomaz was awarded the IROS Toshido Fukuda Young Profressional Award for Outstanding Contributions to Human Robot Interaction during the 2017 IEEE/RSJ IROS conference held in Vancouver, Canada. Congratulations to Dr. Thomaz!

A paper led by a UT graduate student Prashant Rao from the ReNeu Robotics Lab has won the ‘Best Robotics Manipulation Award’ at ICRA 2017! Prashant collaborated with a graduate student Gray Thomas from the Human Centered Robotics Lab. Congraulations to Prashant, Gray and their advisors Dr. Sentis and Dr. Deshpande

Ufuk Topcu, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, is one of eight UT Austin professors selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to receive a 2017 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. The award is the most prestigious offered by the NSF’s CAREER Program.

The Nuclear & Applied Robotics Group took its hands-free interface for high precision on the road a few weeks back and deployed the system on a robot at the Southwest Research Institute who were kind enough to produce a nice video of the results.

Professors Niekum, Thomaz, Sentis, Mooney, and Stone, along with their students and postdocs, are banding together to create a joint entry in the new RoboCup@Home Standard Platform League using the Toyota HSR robot.The competition will be the last week of July in Nagoya, Japan.

Joydeep Biswas presented "Making High-Performance Robots Safe and Easy to Use for an Introduction to Computing" at the EAAI (Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence) symposium, co-located with the AAAI conference, in NYC. The paper (co-authored by Joseph Spitzer and Arjun Guha from UMass Amherst) details a platform that they built to use high-performance soccer robots for introduction to computing workshops.

Ann Majewicz Feywill be joining our Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is coming to us from a professorship at UT Dallas. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2014, and specializes in dynamic systems and control, medical and surgical robots, teleoperation, and haptics.

David Fridovich-Keil will be joining our Department of Aerospace Engineering. He has receive his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and specializes in robust optimal control, motion planning, differential game theory, and safe autonomy.