How 'Bout Them Apples? Engineers Correlate Friction to Texture
Think about biting into a fresh apple. What do you perceive? Is it juicy? Sweet? Tart? Crisp? Now remember how unpleasant it is to bite into mealy apple flesh.
Think about biting into a fresh apple. What do you perceive? Is it juicy? Sweet? Tart? Crisp? Now remember how unpleasant it is to bite into mealy apple flesh.
Competitions, showcases, career success stories and more highlight the work of the School of Engineering and its students at UC Merced’s annual celebration of National Engineers Week, Feb. 18 to 21.
E-Week is an opportunity for engineering students to share the work they do with the campus, invite some friendly competition and introduce other students and younger school children to the field. Each day carries a specific theme, from Project Palooza (a showcase for engineering clubs and organizations) to Professional Day (career advice and alumni success stories).
Harvesting is said to be one of the most costly and labor-intensive operations in strawberry production.
But a UC Merced engineering researcher is looking for ways to make it easier and cheaper. As part of a four-year project, Professor Reza Ehsani will explore the possibilities and benefits of people and robots picking the fruit together.
The undergraduate engineering curriculum at UC Merced offers students professional experience by participating in the senior capstone project, the Innovation Design Clinic (IDC). The IDC culminates in the Innovate to Grow event on Friday, May 17, from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in an annual showcase of student talent and ingenuity, highlighting the culture of entrepreneurship in UC Merced’s School of Engineering .
Now ubiquitous, machine learning has made its way into farming, thanks to an affordable, unmanned ground vehicle that recognizes and spatially maps agricultural pest infestations, treating them with “surgical precision spraying.”
New, award-winning robot-driven technology developed by a team of UC Merced graduate and undergraduate researchers from the Mechatronics, Embedded Systems and Automation (MESA) Lab is helping drive the evolution of food production.
To further his fundamental research into solid oxide fuel cells and other high-temperature electrochemical energy systems, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Professor Min Hwan Lee its prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.
The grant brings the campus’s total to 20 recipients, but his award is the first for the mechanical engineering department.
