December 2022 Statler Circuit: Department Digest and Awards

On November 30, the Statler College and WVU Robotics welcomed 40 members of the Mountaineer Area Robotics Team to campus for an outreach event. The event, which was organized by Jared Beard, an aerospace engineering doctoral student, allowed the high schoolers to visit five different labs on campus, including Jason Gross’s Navigation Lab, Yu Gu’s Interactive Robotics Lab, Nicholas Szczeniski’s Neuro-Mechanical Intelligence Lab, Guilherme Pereira and Marcello Napolitano’s Field and Aerial Robotics Lab and the University Rover Challenge Lab. The event was designed to expose MARS members to the robotics projects going on at WVU and teach them about the opportunities available at Statler College.  

West Virginia University’s Design, Build and Fly club was selected to participate in the 27th annual Design/Build/Fly competition hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Members of WVU DBF will travel to Tucson, Arizona on April 13-16, where they will be tasked with building and testing an aircraft that can carry out flight missions such as surveillance and jamming. The goal is for teams to produce a balanced design possessing demonstrated flight handling qualities that feature practical and affordable manufacturing requirements, while also providing high vehicle performance. Teams will compete for cash prizes ranging from $3,000-$1,500.