UCSD Flow Control & Coordinated Robotics Labs

Welcome to the Flow Control & Coordinated Robotics Labs in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego in sunny La Jolla, CA.

 

The UCSD Flow Control Lab, founded in 1998, investigates a range of questions ranging from fundamental to applied, including the development of advanced analysis tools and numerical methods to better understand, optimize, estimate, forecast, and control fluid systems.

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The UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab, founded in 2004, investigates the mobility and coordination of low-cost robotic vehicles, leveraging dynamic models and feedback control, with prototypes built using cellphone-grade and IoT technologies, custom PCBs, and 3D printing.

 

The two labs collaborate closely on a variety of interdisciplinary projects, including the deployment of robotic sensor vehicle swarms for both real-time hurricane measurement and real-time contaminant plume detection, estimation, & forecasting.  Click here for publications.

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Our team is also actively involved in teaching and outreach.  We are synthesizing our comprehensive notes on a number of related subjects into a unique interdisciplinary text entitled

Numerical Renaissance: simulation, optimization, & control,

and are now writing a second text,

Renaissance Robotics: agile design, coordinated response, & multithreaded behavior;

both will appear in print within about a year.  We have developed a popular Embedded Control & Robotics course, in which each student builds, models, programs, and controls a low-cost linux-based Mobile Inverted Pendulum kit (developed in collaboration with BeagleBoard.org and WowWee.  To maximize impact, we are currently working to make this hardware-focused course globally available as a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC).

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About our lab logo (above left): the dude is affectionately know as Gubbeguy. "Gubbe" in Swedish, roughly translated, means "guy", so the name is a bit peculiar. Gubbeguy was the invention of Markus Högberg when he worked at the Flow Control Lab, and was formed via slight modification of the isosurfaces of an H_infinity convolution kernel computed for the feedback control of a near-wall turbulent flow. The planetary gears behind him, designed by Nick Morozovsky, represent the well-synchronized activities of the Coordinated Robotics lab.   The UCSD logo (above right) is stylized after UCSD's stunning library, and the cool snake path that leads thereto.  (This amazing logo was recently abandoned by the UCSD administration - as with the artistic NASA worm logo, we hope that it will one day be revived.)

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To access the pdfs of the Publications on this website, we ask you to sign up and/or login via the link below, to make sure you aren't a robot (not that we have anything against robots...).  We pledge to not spam you.