Professor receives grant to develop robots to handle and dispose of ordnance

Jan 27, 2017

By UCLA Samueli Newsroom

Veronica Santos, UCLA associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has received a $719,000 grant from the Department of Defense’s Office of Naval Research to develop a robot that would be capable of handling and disposing of ordnance.

The grant will be used to purchase a major piece of equipment in support of research that Santos is leading to advance robotics capabilities for explosive ordnance disposal. Last year, she received a five-year, $1.6 million research grant, also from the Office of Naval Research, for “haptic search and retrieval of objects buried within granular media.”

Her work in UCLA’s Biomechatronics Lab on giving robots a “human” touch to enable them to “feel” something they have never experienced before was featured in this video by the National Science Foundation.

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