Jacobs School engineering demos at the first San Diego Maker Faire

Engineers for Exploration will demo some of their tech at the first-ever San Diego Maker Faire this weekend.

Jacobs School engineers are out in force at this weekend's first-ever San Diego Maker Faire. The event, which takes place Oct. 3 and 4 in Balboa Park will bring together tinkerers, techies, hobbyists of all stripes, educators, artists, crafters--and more.

The event is organized by the City of San Diego, The Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, the San Diego Makers Guild and Tijuana Innovadora.

UC San Diego contributions to the event include:

-  UCSD Robotics will demo the MiP balancing robot at the Robotics Zone
- Engineers for Exploration will demo an automated camera trap, high-tech birds' nest finders and LiDAR scanning, also at the Robotics Zone
- The Qualcomm Institute's high-tech OptIPortable display walls will visualize a mock dig site at the Family Zone
- QI researchers will display several drones at the Drone Zone.

In addition, Jacobs School professors Thomas Bewley (robotics), Steve Swanson (comptuer science) and Falko Kuester (structural engineering) plan to give talks during the event, along with research scientist Curt Schurgers and Ph.D. student James Strawson.

The Global TIES program will be taking over the Jacobs School Instagram feed during the event (@UCSanDiegoengineering).

More about UC San Diego events at the Maker Faire here.

More Maker Faire info at http://sdmakerfaire.org/

Other Jacobs School-affiliated exhibitors include:

. IEEE UCSD

 SEDS@UCSD

 The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers at UCSD

 Divergent Engineering of UCSD

Triton 3D

 Triton Rocket Club

UC San Diego Autonomous Airplane Team

Global TIES 

The future of drones: Jacobs School alums weigh in

When Radley Angelo, class of 2015, spent weekends building and flying RC planes and helicopters with his dad and brothers, he never thought he was already building a foundation for his professional life. Angelo went on to become the CEO of Spark Aerial, a systems integration company that focuses on aerial robotics--meaning drones.

His path from freshman at the Jacobs School to CEO is documented in the latest issue of Triton Magazine, the university's alumni publication, in a story titled "Life Among the Drones."

During his time at UC San Diego, Angelo joined Engineers for Exploration, an organization designed to bring cutting-edge technology to the fields of archaeology and exploration. E4E, as it is also known, is led by Jacobs School alum Albert Lin and computer science professor Ryan Kastner. Members investigate digs anywhere from Lake Tahoe, to the jungles of Guatemala, to Mongolia.

Lin needed someone to drive the $20,000 drones he was using to try and find the tomb of Genghis Khan.  He recalls is the Triton story:

We were in a very remote location and had really great access to satellite imagery, but I wanted to be able to get a bird’s-eye view in areas that were more tree covered,” says Lin. “I found Radley, who was really into remote control helicopters, and took him with me.”

 The story also includes a section about the effort of Jacobs School alumnus Jay Guan to improve FAA regulations for drones. He says:

“On the surface, it seems like the FAA is a little squeamish about this,” says Guan. “But from what I’ve seen, the FAA doesn’t have anything against drones or commercial drones. It’s just that safety has always been an overriding concern, and right now there is no good way to ensure that drone operations won’t compromise that.”

Engineers explore the Guatemalan jungle

It's not every day that you get to explore the jungles of Guatemala as an undergraduate or graduate student. But that's exactly what students in the Engineers for Explorations program get to do every year.

They are led by computer science professor Ryan Kastner and Qualcomm Institute research scientist Albert Lin. Kastner and Lin in turn work with USC archeologist Tom Garrison, Edwin Roman-Ramirez of UT Austin and Jason Paterniti of the GEOS Foundation.

The goal of the yearly expeditions is using drones equipped with LIDAR to find new Maya archeological sites and help document existing sites. Researchers also hope to develop new technologies to speed up data gathering at archeological sites.

You can find out more about last year's expedition here.

Engineers for Exploration at UC San Diego / Learn How to Get Involved on Oct 9

Engineers for Exploration is one of the many great opportunities at the fingertips of engineering students at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Just peruse their list of technology platforms and you will get an idea of the exciting opportunities (see below).

Find out about the opportunities in person and hear about some of their exciting past adventures.

When? Thursday, Oct. 9 from 4:30-5:30pm in the Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall.

Where? Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall (Qualcomm Institute). All majors welcome.


Aerial Camera Platform

Airborne Radio Collar Tracker

Condor Video Camera

CoralCam

Intelligent Camera Trap

Quadcopter

Stereo Diving Rig

Stingray AUV

Terrestrial Vehicl

Don't drink and drone: Jacobs School alumns launch Kickstarter to create drone pilot flight school

"Don't drink and drone!" That's the advice in this fun video produced by SparkAerial, a start-up co-founded by Jacobs School computer science alums Radley Angelo, Kurt Selander and Austin Hill. The company bills itself as a full-service UAV shop and offers for example custom-built quadcopters and other flying UAVs and aerial cinematography services.

The team got their start in the Engineers for Exploration program here at the Jacobs School. Their got to accompany researcher Albert Lin on his expedition to find Genghis Khan's tomb in Mongolia. Since then, their work has been featured on CNN, Good Morning America and the National Geographic Channel, among many others.

They have recently launched a Kickstarter to create a drone pilot school. So far, with 26 days to go, backers have pledged $3,115 of a $5,000 goal. The money would go to creating an aerial cinematography video training series and an online resource center for aspiring drone pilots.
According to their Kickstarter page:

Our goal here is simple; we want to teach the world how to have fun, fly safe, and capture amazing content. The series covers everything from the basics, like choosing a copter and taking off for the first time, to more advanced piloting maneuvers that will make your video the talk of the town.

Help UC San Diego team win the Cornell Cup

A team of UC San Diego students is a finalist in the Cornell Cup, a prestigious engineering competition, and now you can help support them! Each team writes a blog for the competition and the public has now been invited to vote on the blogs.
You can support the UC San Diego team by voting here. The first round of voting ends Feb. 14, with a second round running Feb. 15 to April 2. So vote early and vote often!
Team FANGS is building a ground vehicle that will serve as an observation platform to capture unique, close-quarters footage of wolves at night. The team, which started off as an Engineers for Exploration project here on campus, works closely with the California Wolf Center, located in Julian, east of San Diego.
The Cornell Cup USA, sponsored by Intel, is a college-level design competition created to challenge student teams to use the newest innovative applications of embedded technology in creative ways.
All finalists will converge on the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida in May to win up to $10,000.

Robotic Stingray Takes a Dip

It's called the Stingray. It's an autonomous underwater vehicle that can be loaded with a wide array of sensors to monitor the health of marine habitats. And it's being built by a team of undergraduate students and their graduate student adviser.

It's all part of Engineers for Exploration, a program that allows UC San Diego students to partner with the National Geographic Society, the Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute and San Diego Zoo Global.

On a recent sunny afternoon, students took the Stingray out for a test drive at Canyonview Pool here on the UC San Diego campus. Jennifer Batryn, a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who was visiting for the summer, got into the pool. Perry Naughton, the project's graduate student adviser, supervised the test.     

Here are some pictures of their outing.

Flying Over the Fallen Star

Some of you may have wondered why a small blimp was hovering over the Warren Mall last week. It turns out a group of Jacobs School undergraduates were testing an aerial camera platform, attached to the blimp, which is in fact a balloon (we're told).

The project is part of Engineers for Exploration, a program that allows UC San Diego students to partner with the National Geographic Society, the Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute and San Diego Zoo Global.
For their test flight, the undergraduates had redesigned the camera with new rigging and a new pivoting device called a gimbal. The set-up holds a DSLR camera. The balloon is also equipped with a GoPro video camera. In addition, students rewrote the code that helps the platform remain stable.

The test flight was a success and the students took some amazing pictures and video footage. They created a high resolution panoramic shot by stitching together individual pictures. They also have started working on 3D reconstructions from 2D photographs. The goal is to create photorealistic 3D models of the area the camera platform surveys, where a researcher could virtually "walk through."

In the past, the camera platform has been used to track whales off the San Diego Coast. Students are preparing to take to the sea again soon.

Related links:

Engineers for Exploration

Blog post: Balloon Test on Warren Mall

Photo Gallery: Balloon test

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