University of Texas at Austin

Feature

Del Valle Students Enjoy a Little Autonomy

By Olivia Shaffer

Published May 10, 2022

A Del Valle student flies a DJI Tello drone.

Two groups of senior high school students from Del Valle ISD’s Career and Technical Education program visited the Oden Institute on March 24 and 28. The groups consisted of students from the Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science, and Cybersecurity programs of study at Del Valle. They had the opportunity to tour the Robotics lab at Anna Hiss Gym and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Vislab here in POB, meeting with several Oden Institute faculty and graduate students along the way.

The field trip was the first event from a collaboration made possible by project sponsored by the NASA University Leadership Initiative (ULI). The project, Autonomous Aerial Cargo Operations at Scale, is headed by the Oden Institute’s Ufuk Topcu, with Karen Willcox and John-Paul Clarke (from the Cockrell School of Engineering) as Co-PIs. The primary goal of the research is to develop methods that could be used to validate the cost and scalability of autonomous cargo vehicles.

Nasa ULI projects also include a diversity and outreach component, and the research team at Oden has chosen to partner with Del Valle ISD. The Del Valle district serves roughly 11,000 students, 84.1% of which are Hispanic. The partnership not only allows students an opportunity to engage with some of the innovative research happening at UT and the Oden Institute, but it will also hopefully attract some of the computational scientists and engineers of the future to the Forty Acres.

The students began their visit with a tour of the Robotics Lab at Anna Hiss Gym, facilitated by Jesse Quattrociocchi and Alexander Nettekoven. They had the opportunity to learn about some of the projects going on in the lab while watching demonstrations of robots that could walk, roll, and fly.

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Left image: Ryan Gupta presents A1 Quadruped, made by the company Unitree. Right image: Quattrociocchi shows the students various robots: a large 3D printing drone (D3D), a medium drone called PX4 Vision, DJI Tello drones and turtle bots.

They even had a chance to try out flying the drones themselves! The students attempted to guide DJI Tello drones over, under and around obstacles, and even competed to see who could finish the course the fastest.

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Two Del Valle students maneuver DJI Tello drones around various obstacles.

The group visited Texas Advanced Computing Center's (TACC) Visualization Lab, also located in the Oden Institute building on campus. Because of the close connections between UT's supercomputing facility and so many of the Oden Institute's computational scientists and engineers, no tour would be complete without seeing all the impressive visual capabilities the "VisLab" has to offer. TACC's Senior Outreach Program Coordinator, Geoffrey Reid, gave the students an overview of some of the technologies in the Lab, like the 328 mexapixel tiled display, Stallion - one of the world's highest resolution tiled-displays. They also had an opportunity to experiment with Lasso - a 10 foot wide multi-touch display of 12.4 megapixels consisting of six 46" monitors driven by AMD Eyefinity technology. 

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Left image: Geoffrey Reid presents the capabilities of the Vislab. Right image: Students draw on an interactive screen in the Vislab. All photos credited to Jorge Salazar from TACC.

The Del Valle students met with several graduate students and faculty, including Ufuk Topcu, Karen Willcox, and Atlas Wang of the Oden Institute, Sandeep Chinchali of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and David Fridovich-Keil of Aerospace Engineering.

Many of the students on the visit are looking forward to entering their undergraduate studies this fall, several of them will even be attending UT Austin. Their interests range from computer and electrical engineering to aerospace engineering and math. Some students are planning to continue their education at technical schools or apply their skills in the military, such as the Air Force.

Norris Sebastian III, CTE Director at Del Valle, explained why outreach initiatives, such as this field trip or future immersive experiences, will benefit students: “Many of our students don’t have the resources—whether time, money, language, etc.—to participate in certain activities or opportunities, so we want to make connections for the students so they know they have access to a degree or a career in engineering.”

He added, “These experiences not only allow students to see that they have access to these fields, but it also gives them the confidence that they belong and that they can succeed.”

The Oden Institute and faculty involved with the project are also looking to help develop and deliver lecture modules for some of the Career and Technical Education classes offered at Del Valle, and to design and offer summer research experiences at UT Austin in the near future.

 

All photos are credited to Jorge Salazar from TACC.