News

Biomedical professor at intersection of teaching and entrepreneurship

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 18:56:10 +0000

Biomedical professor at intersection of teaching and entrepreneurship Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/26/2024 - 12:56

Next week’s University of Colorado Showcase is bringing together all that is great about entrepreneurship and innovation across our four campuses.

Our community is made of diverse industries and perspectives – in this case, that of a biomedical professor at CU �鶹ӰԺ who is also the CEO of Aspero Medical.

Mark Rentschler

Mark Rentschler is a tenured professor of mechanical engineering with roles in biomedical engineering, robotics at CU �鶹ӰԺ and surgery at CU Anschutz. He leads the Advance Medical Technologies Laboratory, innovating “smart” medical devices and surgical robotics with support from NSF, NIH and industry partners.

His lab focuses on advancing health care technologies toward a futuristic operating room. As the founding CEO of Aspero Medical, a CU spin-out, Rentschler drives innovation in gastroenterology devices. The company’s FDA-cleared device is on the market, with a promising pipeline for future commercialization.

Here’s a Q&A with Rentschler:

You are interestingly both a professor and a CEO. Which came first, professorial life or private sector life? And how did you move into the other?

It was a bit of both, almost in parallel. Before I started at CU, I spent two years as the first employee in a startup that spun out of a university based on my Ph.D. research. Here is where I was likely first bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. Coming to CU then as a professor, I anticipated spinning technology out at some point, but didn’t anticipate leading the company.

As a deep tech founder, much of the early time at the company was heavy in technical development, so it’s been a reasonably smooth transition to picking up the additional skills needed to lead a small spin-out company.

How has being part of CU �鶹ӰԺ affected your innovations and entrepreneurship?

CU has been extremely supportive of my entrepreneurial pursuits. While there are roadmaps, rarely is there a perfect blueprint for how to translate technology out of a university. CU has been flexible and creative in helping me and my co-founder establish a startup and spin the tech out of the university.

With your unique perspective, how do you see the CU campuses helping or encouraging faculty in their innovation and entrepreneurship journeys?

What I see as a major strength is that CU doesn’t see one size fits all. There is creativity and willingness to try different approaches to supporting faculty and entrepreneurs in an effort to move tech along in an efficient manner. The willingness to try and fail, with emphasis on failing early, is something I’ve observed as a hallmark of success.

CU Showcase is Oct. 4

Meet Rentschler and other members of the CU ecosystem at next week’s CU Showcase, which brings together ventures spanning quantum tech, AI, health care, the arts and more, all tackling big challenges for our state and world. This gathering celebrates their hard work and aims to spark serendipitous connections and creative collaborations that will shape the future of Colorado and our university system.

We hope to see you there: You are the showcase!

Event Details

When: 1-6 p.m. Oct. 4
Where: CU Anschutz Medical Campus
RegisterHERE
Learn more about the initiative HERE

Off

Traditional

White

'The demand is so high'

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:33:59 +0000

'The demand is so high' Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/30/2024 - 10:33

Jeff Zehnder

CU Engineering launches interdisciplinary robotics program, graduate degrees

Engineering graduate students have a new degree option at the �鶹ӰԺ: robotics.

The CU Board of Regents has established a master’s and PhD program in robotics. It will provide students an education merging hardware and software engineering, mathematics and artificial intelligence into a single academic program.

“Robotics is increasingly a key driver for both the future of work and engineering education,” said Alessandro Roncone, an assistant professor and associate director of the robotics program. “This program leverages strengths across the College of Engineering and Applied Science and positions CU �鶹ӰԺ as a leader.”

The program officially began in fall 2023, and interest is already strong, said Sean Humbert, a professor and program director.

“Students really want a PhD in robotics, and employers want that education. I’ve spoken with other university robotics programs that are turning down students with external fellowships because the demand is so high,” Humbert said.

The program brings together a wide array of faculty, research and class options from across CU Engineering departments.

Students enrolled in the program can choose from more than 40 different courses taught by leading researchers with strong expertise in key areas, including field robotics, reasoning and assurance, smart materials, human-centered robotics and biomedical robotics.

“This is a field where the exciting research is, and our program tears down walls between majors so students can receive an interdisciplinary education,” Humbert said. “Students who used to want to take these kinds of courses had to look at multiple different departments every semester and file all kinds of petitions to make the credits work. The robotics program solves all of that.”

In addition to a research-focused PhD, students enrolled in the master’s program can choose from thesis and non-thesis options, providing graduates with opportunities in academia and technical leadership positions in large industry, startups, emergency services and government.

“Our program is designed to evolve with the rapidly changing technology landscape, well-positioning students for high-demand roles across multiple sectors,” Roncone said.

Roncone added that with �鶹ӰԺ and Colorado’s Front Range being home to many businesses active in robotics, there are strong opportunities for educational partnerships and nearby career options for students and graduates.

“With this program, CU �鶹ӰԺ will be at the forefront of a trend that is set to grow nationwide over the next five to 10 years,” Roncone said. “We are providing an unparalleled environment for growth and discovery.”

Off

Traditional

White

Failure is Not an Option: Techniques for Autonomous Robots at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 22:23:53 +0000

Failure is Not an Option: Techniques for Autonomous Robots at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/08/2023 - 15:23

When engineers in the robotics research community think of what we'd like autonomous agents to tackle in the future, we often target "dull, dirty, and dangerous" tasks. However, despite a sustained boom in robotics research over the last decade, the number of places we've seen robotics in use for these tasks has been uninspiring.

In this webinar, hear from Associate Professor Chris Heckman as he explores his team's recent investigation into where the limits of robotic autonomy are for the highly sought-after application to subterranean emergency response operations.

This project was motivated by the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, which just last year concluded with the CU �鶹ӰԺ team "MARBLE" taking third place and winning a $500,000 prize.

Professor Heckman will give an overview into the genesis of his team's solution over three years of effort, especially with respect to mobility, autonomy, perception, and communications. He'll also discuss the implications for present-day robotic autonomy and where we go from here, especially emphasizing our recent work in large language models for these problems.

Off

Traditional

White

CU �鶹ӰԺ offers new graduate program in robotics

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 16:28:02 +0000

CU �鶹ӰԺ offers new graduate program in robotics Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/20/2023 - 10:28

Jeff Zehnder

Robotics Degree Programs

Program Requirements

30 credit hours
1 required course - Introduction to Robotics
43 course options
30 dissertation hours (PhD)
4-6 dissertation hours (Thesis Master’s)

The �鶹ӰԺ has started a graduate engineering program in robotics to fill a growing need in an in-demand field.

The CU Regents have approved new Master of Science and PhD degree options in robotics that will provide students a flexible education that merges hardware and software engineering, mathematics and artificial intelligence into a single program.

“Demand is so high for degrees like this across the country; it’s something students and employers really want,” said Sean Humbert, director of the Robotics Program and a professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The program brings together a wide array of faculty, research and class options from the College of Engineering and Applied Science, according to Chris Heckman, associate professor of computer science and the robotics program.

“The workforce in robotics is often siloed, with people only being specialists in certain elements. We want students to be able to work across the field in computer science, mechanical, electrical, aerospace, wherever they need to be,” Heckman said.

Students enrolled in the program can choose from 40+ different courses taught by leading researchers with strong expertise in key areas, including field robotics, reasoning and assurance, smart materials, human-centered robotics and biomedical robotics.

“CU �鶹ӰԺ is really strong in robotics, and now we’re bringing together all that expertise,” Humbert said. “This field is so interdisciplinary, and we have strong connections and teams both within the university and in industry and the public sector.”

�鶹ӰԺ and Colorado’s Front Range is home to many businesses active in robotics, providing educational partnership and career options for students and graduates, according to Alessandro Roncone, associate director of the Robotics Program and an assistant professor of computer science.

“This program positions students at the nexus of innovative research and real-world application. Not only will they be taught by leading experts in the field, but they'll also have the opportunity to become leaders in robotics and AI. We are committed to fostering creativity and innovation, and our strong tech ecosystem locally provides an unparalleled environment for growth and discovery,” Roncone said.

The program officially launched for the fall 2023 semester, with students transferring into the program from other CU Engineering graduate programs. Prospective students from outside the university will be welcomed starting in fall 2024. That application window is now open.

The �鶹ӰԺ has started a graduate engineering program in robotics to fill a growing need in an in-demand field. The CU Regents have approved new Master of Science and PhD degree options in robotics that will...

Off

Traditional

White

MacCurdy and collaborators advance research in genetic and evolutionary computation

Anonymous — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 17:40:49 +0000

MacCurdy and collaborators advance research in genetic and evolutionary computation Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/28/2023 - 11:40

Assistant Professor Robert MacCurdy and his collaborators have won the ACM SIGEVO Impact Award for their outstanding contributions in the field of genetic and evolutionary computation.

The award recognizes up to three papers a year that were published in the GECCO Conference 10 years earlier and have amassed a high level of citations and deemed to be seminal. Their paper, titled “Unshackling evolution: Evolving soft robots with multiple materials and a powerful generative encoding,” was the only paper to receive the award in 2023.

MacCurdy coauthored the paper along with Nick Cheney, Jeff Clune and Hod Lipson, the latter being the head of the Creative Machines Lab, where MacCurdy and his collaborators met and did the work.

The paper was inspired by the Evolved Virtual Creatures created by Karl Sims; in his research, Sims demonstrated that computational evolution can produce morphologies that resemble natural organisms, but the potential for increasingly complex and natural morphologies hit a ceiling. It was hypothesized that the limitation in morphological types was due to the rigidity of the materials used in the design space and the direct encoding.

Addressing these problems in their paper, MacCurdy and his collaborators demonstrated how computational evolution can be pushed further through the creation of soft robots and the use of generative, evolutionary-based encoding that wielded the power of multi-objective optimization.

“When you’re trying to solve a design problem, it’s smart to show some humility because you don’t ever fully know the true nature of the problem,” said MacCurdy, “so it’s appealing to use a multi-objective design framework that gives you a whole population of very different solutions to that set of design objectives.”

Using their novel approach, MacCurdy and his collaborators were able to create a set of virtual robots whose locomotion resembled animals found in the natural world but also creatures whose gait was wildly idiosyncratic and unique.

“Some robots galloped like a horse. Others had the running gait of a dog or rolled along like a walrus,” MacCurdy said. “I think these designs were able to capture people’s imagination, while also motivating the use of generative algorithms and multi-objective optimization to solve challenging design problems, and that’s why the paper continues to garner citations and serve as an inspiration for others.”

The impact of the paper has received recognition at several conferences, while the SIGEVO Impact Award cements its importance in the robotics community. A video of the work has also garnered hundreds of thousands of views. The real-life applications of the paper have furthered the study of evolutionary biology and the design of soft robots that can move in the real world.

Off

Traditional

White

Jayaram part of team that earns Outreach Award for STEM education

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 21:30:48 +0000

Jayaram part of team that earns Outreach Award for STEM education Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/23/2023 - 15:30

Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram is part of an interdisciplinary team who have received a �鶹ӰԺ Outreach Award for their efforts to get the next generation of STEM programming into rural K-12 schools in Colorado.

New science standards in Colorado require students to learn by working through problems rather than memorizing facts. These new standards, based on Next Generation Science Standards, represent a significant change in what students will be expected to know and how science teachers will teach.

To address these changing needs, Jayaram and his team want to develop a bioinspired robotics toolkit and an accompanying curriculum that will emphasize real-world problem-solving and hands-on learning. They call it “Build a Better Bug.”

The team brings together a diversity of disciplines. Along with Jayaram, Alexandra Rose of the Ecology and Evolutionary Department will help lead the team. Distinguished Professor William Penuel of the School of Education, Nathan McNeill, Stacey Forsyth and Scott Sieke will also lend their expertise in education.

The toolkits are inspired by Jayaram’s research in his Animal Inspired Movement and Robotics Laboratory, where Jayaram and his research team study concepts from biology and apply them to the design of real-world engineered systems. In his lab, you can find robots modeled after the body morphologies of cockroaches and spiders.

“We are fundamentally interested in understanding why animals are the way they are,” said Jayaram, “and how we can build bioinspired robots that can address social needs, like search and rescue, environmental monitoring or even use them during surgery.”

The toolkits will give middle school students a chance to combine biology and robotics in their own ways. The kits will feature origami-based foldable body and appendage designs that are inspired by a variety of insects, such as cockroach legs, ladybug wings or mantis claws.

After combining and rearranging parts to make their own unique bug, the students will use Python/Arduino-compatible open-source electronics to drive the robot and its biologically inspired sensors. Also, the students will have a Chromebook-compatible app to program, communicate and play with their designs.

While building and interacting with their robot bugs, students will probe the underlying principles of what makes certain species evolutionarily successful and how we could perhaps learn from those insights.

“I love the opportunity to work at the intersection of biology and engineering,” Rose said. "And I hope to co-opt students’ excitement about robots to get them secretly learning about topics as seemingly diverse as physics, physiology, evolution, and the engineering design process.”

By leveraging CU’s partnership with Colorado Mesa University, Jayaram and his cohort plan to target an audience in a more rural part of the state to pilot the project. Also, they plan to work with the Eureka McConnel Science Museum in Grand Junction, which runs educational and youth camps and served 26,682 learners in 2022 alone.

“We want our primary audience to be students who don’t have ready access to the exciting science and engineering happening at CU,” Jayaram said. “That includes students who live away from the urban centers of our state.”

Jayaram also hopes the project can address gender biases in STEM through the way in which it bridges robotics with so many other different disciplines.

As Jayaram and his cohort pilot “Build a Better Bug,” they plan to collect feedback from both students and teachers. Through photos, student-made videos, interviews and reflection exercises, they will fine-tune the toolkits and accompanying curriculum for future iterations.

“We are excited to field-test these materials and believe that they will create impactful learning experiences for students,” Jayaram said.

Jayaram and his collaborators are actively looking for talented undergraduate and graduate students who would like to contribute to the project. If you have experience in computer science and electronics and are interested in education and outreach, don’t hesitate to reach out: Kaushik.jayaram@colorado.edu.

Off

Traditional

White

Video: Kaushik Jayaram on Bio-Inspired Engineering

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 18:42:09 +0000

Video: Kaushik Jayaram on Bio-Inspired Engineering Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/12/2023 - 12:42

Inspired by the natural world, Kaushik Jayaram heads up the Animal Inspired Movement and Robotics Laboratory (AIM-RL) at CU �鶹ӰԺ. The group aims to develop robotic devices that benefit and enhance human capabilities in the areas of search and rescue, inspection and maintenance, personal assistance, and environmental monitoring. As an assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jayaram's work is highly interdisciplinary, working at the crossroads of engineering, biomimicry and design.

Off

Traditional

White

CU �鶹ӰԺ team takes home $500,000 in international underground robotics competition

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 18:39:39 +0000

CU �鶹ӰԺ team takes home $500,000 in international underground robotics competition Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/12/2023 - 12:39

A CU �鶹ӰԺ team has taken home third place and $500,000 in prize money in an international competition that sends teams of robots deep underground to conduct search-and-rescue operations.

The CU �鶹ӰԺ group, made up of engineers from across the university, took part in the final event of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean Challenge from Sept. 21-24 in Louisville, Kentucky. The competition, now in its third year, has pushed the bounds of what autonomous vehicles are capable of: Over three tense challenges, teams from around the world launched fleets of drones into underground caves, mines, subway tunnels and more to complete a high-tech game of hide-and-seek—searching for lost “artifacts” amid hazards like dust and mud and steep drops.

The competition strives to develop new technologies that could one day safely locate the human survivors of disasters like mine and cave collapses.

“I couldn’t be prouder of all of our brilliant and talented graduate and undergraduate students that earned this award and international recognition,” said Sean Humbert, a professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering who leads the CU �鶹ӰԺ team.

DARPA recognized the CU �鶹ӰԺ group, named Multi-agent Autonomy with Radar-Based Localization for Exploration (MARBLE), Friday, Sept. 24, at a prize ceremony in Kentucky.

MARBLE includes researchers from CU Denver, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Massachusetts-based Scientific Systems Company, Inc. Researchers from CU �鶹ӰԺ also hailed from the Department of Computer Science and Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. In 2018, the group received $4.5 million to join in the challenge and competed in a cohort of six funded teams.

Watch live coverage of the final event from DARPA

Stefanie Tompkins, director of DARPA, addressed the competitors at the awards ceremony: “I have heard some of you say off to the side and some of you say directly to my face that when they first heard about this, they were absolutely positive it was impossible,” she said. “So thank you for ignoring your gut feelings and diving into this competition and proving to all of us that it’s not impossible.”

For the final event, eight teams, including several un-funded groups, traveled to Kentucky’s famed Louisville Mega Cavern. Spanning nearly 100 acres, this former mine ranks as the biggest building in the state. It includes warehouses, tunnels and natural caverns—complete with dangers like stairs, rough pathways and DARPA-installed “dynamic” obstacles like falling debris.

To nab third place, MARBLE sent a group of four robots into this perilous environment, including two rolling vehicles and two dog-like robots manufactured by the company Boston Dynamics. The robots worked on their own to earn points by finding series of targets, such as backpacks, cellphones, gas leaks and lost helmets.

And the group was able to adjust its strategy as it went.

“Early on at the final event, our team’s perspective began to shift to thinking about our system less as an autonomy experiment and more as a tool to interrogate subterranean environments,” Humbert said. “We started to incorporate additional human-robot interaction elements that resulted in an additional five to seven points in the final round, and ultimately a third-place finish.”

MARBLE earned 18 points, placing behind second-place finisher CSIRO Data61, led by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, with 23 points. First place and $2 million went to CERBERUS, led by ETH Zurich. MARBLE also earned a special recognition for finding an artifact, a red power drill, before any other team—just 68 seconds into the competition.

Scenes from the Subterranean Challenge finals

From Sept. 21-24, 2021 CU �鶹ӰԺ engineers took part in a high-stakes challenge that sent fleets of robots deep underground to search for lost "artifacts."View all photos »

View all photos

Off

Traditional

White

New framework will enable better control of large networked systems

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 18:32:52 +0000

New framework will enable better control of large networked systems Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/12/2023 - 12:32

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are ubiquitous in nature and science, from flocks of birds and neurons in the brain, to social networks and quantum spin systems. That makes the question of how to control these natural or manmade systems a popular problem for engineers.

Assistant Professor Xudong Chen wants to develop a new framework for controlling large MAS that will make these networks more resilient and scalable.

In his research proposal, Chen explained that existing approaches to controlling multi-agent systems rely on forming one big network, wherein the controller steers a few leading agents, with the rest of the agents sensing what the leader is doing and playing follow-the-leader. But as those networks get bigger, they also get more fragile and unwieldly.

“The idea is, in fact, simple: Instead of controlling a large complex network, we steer a population of small ones,” Chen said.

In his proposed framework, agents of a MAS form independent networks of relatively small size.

“We then control the MAS by using a few common control inputs to simultaneously steer all of the individual networks,” Chen said. “The proposed framework will be able to accommodate arbitrarily many individual networks and, meanwhile, achieve controllability with a fixed number of control inputs.”

To establish the framework, his team will have to integrate ensemble control theory and networked control theory in an approach they’re calling “ensemble control of network motifs.” Chen said the focus on infinite ensembles of networked control systems makes the approach adaptable to various problems, including unmanned aerial systems, micro-robotic systems, quantum systems and biological networks.

Chen said he also looks forward to incorporating this approach into courses for both graduate and undergraduate students.

“This is an opportunity to integrate interdisciplinary research aspects (mathematics, systems and controls, and computer science) into the undergraduate curriculum at an early stage,” he said. “I plan to make a dedicated effort to engage students from various departments at CU �鶹ӰԺ.”

Off

Traditional

White

Robotics professors win award for modern textbook

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 18:30:27 +0000

Robotics professors win award for modern textbook Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/12/2023 - 12:30

Professors Nikolaus Correll, Bradley Hayes, Christoffer Heckman and Alessandro Roncone have received a recognition award from the College of Engineering and Applied Science for their work, Introduction to Autonomous Robots: Mechanisms, Sensors, Actuators, and Algorithms, an open textbook focusing on computational principles of autonomous robots.

The award was created to recognize the achievements of CEAS faculty who author or co-author a significant educational textbook.

The textbook is being published this month by MIT Press and it is also available on GitHub via a Creative Commons 4.0 (CC-BY-NC-ND) license.

Under that license type, readers can use images and content from the book for non-commercial purposes with proper attribution, but cannot post compiled versions of the book online. This includes labs and slides to help instructors create their own introductory courses, said Roncone.

"As many students rely on YouTube videos and their phones as primary reading devices, the classical textbook becomes more and more obsolete. Freely available illustrations are critical for actively transitioning into new formats, carrying CU and the MIT Press forward," Correll said.

Correll said their textbook model is forward-thinking, providing the best trade-off between a freely available resource that folks can contribute to while also providing a consistent curriculum that others can rely upon.

Roncone said he agreed.

"Robotics is a fast-moving field, and the future of robotics education will strongly benefit from a model that combines a traditional editorial process with open-source community engagement that magnifies our impact," he said.

The curriculum the textbook lays out is robot-agnostic, focusing not on the particular specifications of one robot's architecture, but on the underlying mathematics and logical decisions that govern autonomous robotic decisions.

The book is also aimed at undergraduate students, which is notable as most robotics books leave algorithm design to a graduate student audience. This resource has already been used by undergraduate students over the past several years through classes taught by the co-authoring professors.

Off

Traditional

White