The California Space Grant Consortium is pleased to resume our Undergraduate Engineering Seminars, designed to introduce undergraduate students to funded research opportunities.

Upcoming Seminar will be Wednesday, October 30, 2013 from 3:00 to 4:00.

Speaker: Jeff Friesen, Ph.D Student, UC San Diego

Where: UC San Diego’s Jacobs Hall, Room 2512, Henry G. Booker Room

Topic: Jeff will discuss his research experiences at UCSD as well as his work in the design and control of robotic systems, with a focus on a tensegrity robot named DuCTT, designed during an internship last summer at NASA Ames Research Center supported by the California Space Grant. The robot is designed to climb through duct systems with two linked tetrahedral frames, each containing a linear actuator, connected by a system of eight actuated cables. Because the control of tensegrity robots is extremely challenging due to the highly coupled dynamics of tensegrity systems, Jeff will also touch on many of the current approaches to controlling such robots, and highlight the main problems that must be overcome to make such robots functional.

Bio: Jeffrey Friesen received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UCSD and is currently pursuing his Ph.D within the Coordinated Robotics Lab at UCSD. His main interests are in improving the mobility, flexibility and adaptive capabilities of robots through the implementation of new design approaches and intelligent control algorithms. Though his current focus is in robotics, Jeff has a diverse research history at UCSD including topics such as vibrational energy harvesting, damage identification and bench-marking, sound localization, modal analysis of structures, and liquid propelled rockets. He also has a strong interest in teaching and has assisted in the instruction of an undergraduate robotics course at UCSD and a COSMOS cluster for high school students which focused on tensegrity structures.

For flyer: Please click here.

For more information: Please call Becky Howard; (858) 822-1597