Engineer Wins Award for Robotics Research

Helping robots think for themselves so they can avoid obstacles is one of the biggest obstacles robotics researchers face. But a UC engineer's progress in finding a solution recently earned him international recognition.

Graduate student Sachin Modi received the Best Student Presentation Award at the SPIE Intelligent Robotics and Computer Vision Conference. SPIE is the International Society for Optical Engineering.

Modi is working on his master's degree in industrial engineering and a team leader on the UC robotics team which competes each year in a national mobile robot competition.

His conference presentation, "Comparison of Three Obstacle Avoidance Methods for a Mobile Robot," earned top honors at the international conference. Modi compared fixed mounting of sonar sensors, a rotating sonar sensor, and a laser scanner system. All were used on UC's competition robot, but Modi believes the research will have important applications in industry as well.

"The significance of the research is in the increased understanding of obstacle avoidance for robot control and the applications of autonomous guided vehicle technology for industry, defense and medicine," said Modi. "The quality of this research is indicated by our performance in the International Ground Robotics Competition in 2001."

UC came in 5th place overall, and only two schools had better obstacle course runs than the UC Bearcat robot. The team's adviser is industrial engineering professor Ernie Hall. Modi says Hall deserves much of the credit for his recent honor.

"I was happy to know I had won the award. It was possible for me to win only due to the guidance and encouragement given by Dr. Hall," said Modi who came to UC from India because of the college's reputation for excellence.

"I chose UC for my master's, because it has a good industrial engineering department and the faculty are well known in the field."

Modi will receive a certificate and cash award for his presentation. He is the first UC engineer to ever receive the award.