News

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has awarded nearly $2 million to a national research consortium that includes lead institution Ohio State University as well as the University of California-Irvine and the University of Texas at Austin. The grant will create a new Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC). According to the DOT, these centers aim to “advance research and education programs that address critical transportation challenges facing our nation.”

The UT Austin Villa Robotics Team recently won third place at the RoboCup@Home 2017 competition, in the category of Domestic Standard Platform League. The competition was held in Nagoya, Japan. Robocup was originally founded by Japanese researchers to develop robots that could play soccer well enough to eventually defeat world champion players. The idea was playfully implemented in order to fuse robot engineering with artificial intelligence and development. Now the original goal of the competition has expanded to include other areas and goals of robotics.

The Wireless Networking and Communications Group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin is part of a team that has been awarded a $1.4 million grant for the development of a Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) by the USDOT’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) to advance cutting-edge research and educational programs that address critical transportation challenges facing our nation.