Student-Made Robot Car Loopin' Around Campus

Here is a video showing the prototype for IEEE UCSD's Natcar team 2 going around a circular track at SWE Envision.

Check out the photo gallery here.

Learn more about the ViaCar project here...which, if you're keeping track, used to be called NatCar.

more info:

ViaCar is an undergraduate design competition sponsored by ViaSat and hosted by UC San Diego. Teams of undergraduate students design, build, and race an autonomous car which must follow a track marked by white tape on dark-colored carpet. Under the tape, there is a wire carrying a 100mA rms 75kHz sinusoidal signal. The fastest cars travel at average speeds of up to 10ft/s. IEEE UCSD provides funding for several teams to compete.

The goal of the ViaCar project is to build an autonomous 1/10 scale RC car car that can race around track marked by a wire carrying a sinusoidal current. Two potential approaches are optics and magnetics. Since the course is marked by white tape, an optical approach might use a camera and image processing to try to “see” the track and determine the car’s position and orientation relative to the track. The electromagnetic approach relies on Faraday’s law of induction, which states that the induced electromotive force or EMF in any closed circuit is equal to the time rate of change of the magnetic flux through the circuit. If you place a coil near the track, a sinusoidally-varying EMF will be induced in the coil, the magnitude of which will depend on the coil’s orientation and distance from the wire. One can then feed this signal into a controller which will actuate the car's steering mechanism to steer the car back on track.

The competition is held annually in May in the form of a race. The competition website has more details. The team with the lowest total time, including penalities, wins!

Wind Turbine on Shaketable...now in Union Tribune

Scott LaFee from the San Diego Union Tribune wrote a story in the Sunday Feb 7 paper about the shake tests happening over this week and next out at the UCSD Englekirk Structural Engineering Center. They are testing wind turbines...and how wind turbines will fare during a series of earthquakes. More info on the tests is here, in a previous blog post.

LaFee's story, which includes a nice photo of structural engineering professor Ahmed Algamal is here: Wind turbine getting seismic shakedown Structure’s performance in temblors to be tested

Here is a web cam of the shake table.

Engineer's Week is Coming

Engineer's Week 2010...aka E-Week is coming to the Jacobs School. TESC has an E-Week site where you can get all the info. They also have tons of info on Facebook.

Be sure to check out the embedded videos from Last year's E-Week...available at the site above or embedded below:

E-Games



ENSPIRE


DECaF (Jacobs School student-run career fair)

UC San Diego Library--Calling for Input

What kind of library does UC San Diego want and need in the years ahead?

Post your advice at http://blog.ucsd.edu/libstratplan/ and have your say. The blog is also linked off the libraries’ homepage. The blog is available through February 10, 2010. In addition, there will be traveling whiteboards throughout the lobbies of the libraries for you to have your say over the next three weeks.

Blog available through February 21, 2010

One Gigantic Jacobs School of Engineering Poster Session

If you've never been to a Research Expo at the Jacobs School, you don't know what you are missing.

There are more than 200 posters, each with a grad student standing there ready to explain the research and it's implications. It's like a real life engineering encyclopedia...where all the entries are cutting edge.

There are also faculty talks, and a keynote by National Academy of Engineering (NAE) member Lawrence Papay entitled "Renewables and America's Energy Future". And speaking of America's energy future, reading Carbon Nation this morning, I stumbled across IEEE Spectrum's "energy wise" blog.

Last year's Research Expo grad student winners are here.

Registration info for folks who want to check out all the talented Jacobs School students is here.

This year, Research Expo is on April 15, 2010, and it starts at 12:30 PM (in the afternoon...not in the morning like it has in past years.)

If you are a grad student at the Jacobs School, make sure to submit your poster. The student poster submission site is here.

Computer Scientists Win Google Grant for Energy Efficient Computing Research

Computer science professors Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat are in the news today. Why? They won a Google research grant, which will provide funding for their ongoing research on energy efficiency in computing. The grant is for $100,000 according to an Xconomy story by Gregory Huang who is Editor at Xconomy Seattle.

Here is the blog post from Google (via Xconomy).
The New York Times blog post is here.
The North County Times blog post is here.

In the last issue of Pulse, the Jacobs School alumni magazine, I wrote about how Tajana Simunic Rosing is working to make data centers both green and flexible.

She and Amin Vahdat were are also part of the Multi-Scale Systems Center (MuSyC), which will focus on tackling a critical issue affecting multiple scales: energy efficiency.

Here is the Web page for computer science professor Steven Swanson.

Natural Ventilation Instead of Air Conditioning

What if breeze outside could be used to cool a building...kind of like a natural fan. That is part of the idea behind a new grant to mechanical enginering professor Paul Linden, who also directs UC San Diego Sustainability Solutions Institute.

We wrote about Linden's work with natural ventilation in conjunction with the San Diego Children's Museum. (It was a past issue of Pulse the Jacobs School alumni magazine.)

Below is part of the announcement that the UC San Diego Sustainability Solutions Institute put out today.

...but first...if you are still reading, you'll probably be interested in UC San Diego's Greenovation Forums. The next one is about sustainability and nature.

UC San Diego Sustainability Solutions Institute (SSI’s) Director and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) professor Paul Linden has been awarded $1.9 Million dollars from the California Energy Commission (CEC) to study the potential for natural ventilation retrofits in California’s commercial building stock. The contract is part of the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program and involves partnerships with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, UC Berkeley Center for the Built Environment, ARUP San Francisco, and CPP Wind.


Buildings are responsible for approximately 35% of greenhouse gas emissions. It is estimated that natural ventilation in new construction and, more importantly, retrofits could significantly reduce the carbon footprint of California’s commercial building stock. However, the implementation of natural ventilation is impeded by a number of significant barriers.

The goal the research is to conduct a comprehensive study of these issues and provide the knowledge and new tools to the community that will allow owners, designers and policy makers to make informed decisions about the implementation of natural ventilation in California. The proposed program will also provide the first tool in a recognized building energy simulation program to allow the different design alternatives to be analyzed, and for the potential energy savings and greenhouse gas emission reductions to be calculated accurately. The present limitations make wind-driven natural ventilation a risky strategy for a designer to recommend and so severely hamper its adoption. This program should remove these barriers and provide the tools and information for the appropriate implementation of natural ventilation in commercial buildings.

More information about the CEC’s Building End-Use Energy Efficiency Research program can be found here.