Vires Aero
05/01/15 — Vires Aeronautics is developing a new technology to make flight more efficient.
Aerospace
Synthetic biology could be big boost to interplanetary space travel
11/06/14 — Genetically engineered microbes could help make manned missions to Mars, the moon and other planets more practical, according to a new analysis by UC Berkeley bioengineers and NASA scientists.
Dreams of the world: Flight simulation of robotic birds
12/18/13 National Geographic — Cameron Rose, an EECS grad student whose research focuses on flapping-winged robots in flight, dreams of one day helping the field of robotics achieve "something even close to the level of maneuverability and control that animals possess," he told National Geographic. "I also dream to use my knowledge and passion for robotics to encourage other African American students to pursue similar paths."
Flying to the edge of darkness
11/22/13 — Adam Wright (B.S'05 ME) is building submarines that fly through water. He started his career at Hawkes Ocean Technologies as an unpaid intern before his freshman year of college. Early this year, he was named the company's president and CEO.
California vies for drone-testing contracts
04/08/13 KQED — As the FAA pushes ahead with plans to test-fly unmanned nonmilitary drones at six sites around the country, including possibly some in California, Dean of Engineering Shankar Sastry weighs in on some of the concerns - safety, privacy, technology - that must be addressed.
Piggyback ride
11/01/12 — Berkeley Engineering students helped create CINEMA (CubeSat for Ions, Neutrals, Electrons and MAgnetic fields), a low-cost nanosatellite designed to piggyback aboard other NASA missions.
Engineering Better Disaster Relief
05/02/09 — Scheduling problems, which involve searching for an optimal or near-optimal schedule for a set of tasks, are notoriously complex because simple searches are overwhelmed by their explosively vast number of possibilities. But with large-scale manufacturing and distribution operations, fractional improvements in scheduling can have large-scale impacts on the bottom line, which is why industrial engineers are routinely called upon to create customized sophisticated strategies for specific scheduling problems. Now, Professor Rhonda Righter has applied industrial engineering–style analysis to a different type of scheduling problem: after a mass casualty event, such as a natural disaster, a wreck or an attack, how should a medical emergency response team allocate its attention to patients, in order to save the most lives?
Even Flying Robots Need Friends
09/02/08 — Pilotless aircraft let the military quickly gather intelligence about hot spots without having to put pilots at risk or wait for the next imaging satellite flyover. But many tasks, both military and civilian, can be accomplished better by teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) programmed to collaborate. Multiple autonomous UAVs can cover more ground than a single plane, and with their own smarts, they demand less human attention. To develop this technology, mechanical engineering professor Karl Hedrick co-directs the Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles.