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How Automation Is Changing the World, and the Workforce

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At transportation terminals, automation is boosting productivity and creating safer work environments. In the medical device industry, it’s advancing product development and letting employees learn new technologies. And in aerospace, it’s leading to new manufacturing processes and a future age of autonomous aircraft.

At Thursday’s Fall Engineering Distinguished Lecture, representatives from all three industries shared how automation is changing the world—and the workforce.

“This is one of those topics that is very pertinent—automation, robotics, artificial intelligence—all the things we live with today,” said moderator Rolando Saldana, vice president of engineering at Qualcomm. “Going forward, we’re also seeing that industry is moving forward with automation. And these (speakers) are the folks who are putting together the systems.” Continue reading “How Automation Is Changing the World, and the Workforce”

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NSF Grant Will Help Advance Understanding of Human Motion

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Dr. Emel Demircan, an assistant professor in the CSULB Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering departments.

Emel Demircan, an assistant professor in the CSULB Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering departments, has been awarded a $175,000 grant to advance the understanding of human motor performance to help clinicians develop more effective motion-training treatments.

The National Science Foundation award will fund research to create a cyber-human framework that advances robotics and biomechanics, deepening scientific understanding of human motor performance dictated by musculoskeletal physics and neural control.

“The project has great potential to impact our society by creating a wearable cyber-human system to provide immediate feedback to the wearer to make postural corrections – applicable for the reeducation of patients with musculoskeletal disorders and for performance improvement in motion training,” she said. Continue reading “NSF Grant Will Help Advance Understanding of Human Motion”

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Stanford’s Khatib on Developing Robots for Hostile Environments

Robots for Hostile EnvironmentsThe idea to create an underwater robot came out of a conversation Stanford University computer science professor Oussama Khatib had with an underwater archeologist at a conference. Three years later, the university celebrated Ocean One’s first mission—diving 300 feet below the surface to recover items from a ship that sank off the coast of France in 1664.

Khatib, an expert in human-robot interaction, was at CSULB Friday to deliver a technical seminar on the New Robotics Age.

In the classroom, he said, students have taught robots to play ping pong, barbecue food, and fight. In the medical field, robot-aided surgery and robotic catheterization are being developed. And in the area of human augmentation, a number of different exoskeletons have been designed. Continue reading “Stanford’s Khatib on Developing Robots for Hostile Environments”