The mission of the CARS center is to support UD faculty and students and facilitate their efforts to improve the community’s quality of life and working conditions through innovative and collaborative research on robotic and other cyber-physical systems, which can interact physically with their environment as well as cognitively with humans.

According to Deputy Director Art Trembanis, a professor of oceanography, “the CARS center will help catalyze robotics activity across many disciplines and translate that knowledge into solutions for society and for commercial partners.”  Noting the role of CARS as a talent hub. Trembanis explained that “by drawing on expertise from throughout the entire UD system and leveraging our existing resources and central proximity in the Mid-Atlantic Bight makes CARS an ideal partner for industry and federal agency partners looking to advance the field of robotics.” (When talking about oceanography, a bight is a  long, gradual bend or recess in the shoreline.)

The CARS center has already received its first grant, through the U.S. Army’s Scalable, Adaptive and Resilient Autonomy program. The project is about enabling the Army’s ground robots to navigate autonomously (minimal to no human intervention) through forest environments.

Guoquan (Paul) Huang, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is the principal investigator; Tanner is the co-principal investigator.  Huang is leading vehicle calibration and localization research efforts, while Tanner is working on the motion planning side of the problem. They are bringing their expertise together to improve the Army’s capabilities.

The new center will complement research in other centers and institutes at UD, including the Data Science Institute (DSI).  Collaborations with DSI at the center level are already on the way.

For students who want to design, build and program the robots of the future, UD offers a master of science in robotics, which is expected to complement the research activities of CARS and be able to benefit from the increased exposure and additional instructional resources that CARS will offer.

The CARS center’s advisory board includes Josh Broussard, chief technology officer at Ocean Infinity; Vijay Kumar, dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science; Lydia Kavraki, director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University; and Magnus Egerstedt, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

For more information and to get involved, visit robotics.engr.udel.edu.