Kathryn Daltorio, Assistant Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was awarded a Grainger Grant following her participation in the 2019 NAE Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) symposium.

The 2019 symposium attendees were invited to participate in a competition for two Grainger grants. Daltorio's group (which included Masahiro Ono at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) was awarded one of the grants. The grant will support two focused meetings on autonomous responsive control of modular robots for confined spaces. Daltorio and Ono hope that by working together they can apply and validate new control strategies that give modular robots greater responsiveness and autonomy. The grant will also cover funding for a graduate student to bridge implementation between Daltorio’s bio-inspired robotics work and Hiro’s Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) project, an ambitious confined space robot. Robots that can move in confined spaces have the potential to help address several of the NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering.