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.