Funding, Grants & Awards
UC Berkeley Researchers Win Augmented Reality Grant
Researchers at the University of
California Berkeley have won a $100,000 grant to continue their work using
augmented reality to make it easier for people to control autonomous aerial
vehicles commonly known as "drones."
The team, led by three faculty members from the UC Berkeley Robotics and Intelligent Machines
Lab, is one of five teams from around the country that were selected as
recipients of the Microsoft
HoloLens Academic Research Grant Program. The grant program challenged
applicants to come up with ideas that could "harness the potential of Microsoft
HoloLens and push the boundaries of possible applications for holographic
computing," according to information from Microsoft. As part of the award, the
team won two Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition virtual reality headsets to use in their research. The team
has previously received grants from NASA and the Office of Naval Research.
Shankar Sastry, the dean of the College of Engineering at Berkeley and one
of the project's leads, launched the research initiative three years ago in
partnership with researchers and students in electrical engineering, computer
science, chemical engineering and psychology at UC Berkeley, Stanford University and UCLA. Together they have been working to
develop a simplified user interface that would enable an individual to pilot
multiple autonomous aerial vehicles using the Microsoft HoloLens. One potential
application for the technology could be to search for survivors in the
aftermath of a disaster.
An undergraduate student from the Virtual
Reality @ Berkeley club is also leading a group of undergraduates "to
develop augmented reality solutions for drones with the principal
investigators' research groups," according to information from the
university.
Research teams from Carnegie Mellon
University, Dartmouth College, Virginia Tech and Clackamas Community College & Intel
rounded out the list of Microsoft HoloLens grant recipients.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].
