Image courtesy of RE2 Robotics. From UCLA Newsroom.

Matthew Chin | January 25, 2017

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 a video by the National Science Foundation.