Robotics Internships Formed Through New Collaborative Program

ECE students Matteo Mischiati and Philip Twu will spend this summer interning with Intelligent Automation Inc. (IAI) in Rockville, Md. through a new collaborative program with the University of Maryland's Intelligent Servosystems Laboratory (ISL).

Mischiati, a first-year Ph.D. student and advisee of Professor P.S. Krishnaprasad (ECE/ISR), is spending this summer as a graduate intern at IAI. He is working on path planning algorithms for teams of mobile robots, soon to be implemented on a collection of AmigoBot robots. Mischiati received his Laurea degree in 2004 from the ancient University of Bologna in Italy, and worked for two years as a flight control systems engineer for Augusta S.P.A. in Milan before enrolling in the ECE graduate program. Mischiati is working closely with IAI senior scientist Babak Azimi-Sadjadi, an ECE alumnus (Ph.D. 2001, advisee of Krishnaprasad).

Philip Twu, who will be a senior in the fall pursuing a double major in electrical engineering and computer science, is an undergraduate intern at IAI this summer. He is working on the implementation of MDLe, a motion control language for robotics. MDLe was initiated in 1994 in the ISL as a part of the M.S. thesis of Vikram Manikonda (Ph.D., 1997), who is now vice president at IAI. In the ensuing decade, MDLe has undergone further development and implementations at ISL. In its new industrial-strength implementation, MDLe will use Cybele, a distributed agent framework and IAI software product. Twu is working closely with IAI engineer Zachary Kulis, an ECE alumnus (M.S. 2006, joint advisee of Krishnaprasad and Eric Justh).

Published June 23, 2007