News & Events
Professor Thomas Bewley Joins Forces with ATA Engineering to Develop Robotic Systems
Professor Thomas R. Bewley, director of UCSD Flow Control and Coordinated Robotics Labs, will collaborate and consult with ATA Engineering’s growing robotics and controls group.
SAN DIEGO, Calif., April 8, 2014 – ATA Engineering, Inc., (ATA) a nationwide provider of innovative, high-value test- and analysis-driven mechanical engineering design solutions, today announced that Professor Thomas Bewley from the University of California, San Diego, (UCSD) will spend the next several months working with ATA to advance its robotics and control-structure interaction objectives.
Professor Bewley’s research interests lie at the intersection of control theory, dynamics, fluid mechanics, numerical methods, and applied math, and he has a particular interest in the analysis, estimation, and forecasting of environmental flow systems with coordinated deployments of advanced robotic systems. Professor Bewley directs the UCSD Flow Control and Coordinated Robotics Labs, two dynamic teams of talented doctoral students working on diverse yet complementary problems ranging from optimization theory and numerical methods for computational fluid dynamics to the development of cleverly simple and robust robotic vehicles capable of remarkably advanced maneuvers.
ATA and Professor Bewley have worked together over the last year on a number of initiatives. Along with the development of joint proposals, ATA supported the development of last fall’s Linux-based student-built robotic systems in Bewley’s Embedded Controls and Robotics course. In the coming months, Professor Bewley and ATA engineers will advance the application of small autonomous vehicles to endeavors such as search and rescue, contaminant plume tracking/forecasting, and targeted reconnaissance for firefighters while exploring other areas of intersecting interests.
“We are thrilled to have Professor Bewley working with ATA and we appreciate his experience and expertise in these areas,” said Dr. Clark Briggs, Vice President of Aerospace and Defense Business Development. “Our combined understanding of both structural dynamics and controlled dynamical systems will further the development of our business in the industries we serve. Bringing this in-depth understanding of structural dynamics to controlled dynamical systems is a rapidly growing business sector in the entertainment and aerospace industries served by ATA.”