Dr. David P. Miller spoke at the 2017 Oklahoma City Joint Engineering Societies Banquet on February 23, 2017 at the Gaylord Student Center at Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond, Oklahoma.
The program featured Dr. David P. Miller, who since 1999 has been the Wilkonson Chair and Professor of Intelligent Systems based in the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (AME) at the University of Oklahoma. Miller has a Bachelors in Astronomy from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science/AI from Yale. His primary research areas are in mobility, the tradeoff between algorithm and mechanism, assistive technology and STEM education. Miller worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for his work at JPL leading to the Mars Pathfinder Rover Mission. He is a founder of KISS Institute for Practical Robotics and their Botball Program. Miller is the faculty advisor for the OU Boomer Rocket Team and the Sooner Rover Team (SoRo). In the Fall of 2015, OU was competitively selected as one of eight universities to compete in the NASA RASC-AL Robo-Ops competition. The competition involves finding and retrieving designated samples from Mars and Lunar-like environments (at NASA JSC) while tele-operating the rover from a remote location (in our case, Norman OK). OU students designed and built the rover over the next 8 months and competed in May of 2016. This talk will discuss the team, their design and performance at the competition (Spoiler: we won).
According to Miller, after his “Rovers and OU Student Engineering Teams” presentation, several high school students that plan to attend the University of Oklahoma expressed interest in joining rover, rocket or space related student teams and were currently involved in robotics teams at their high school.
The Oklahoma Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) Central/Southwest Chapter sponsored the banquet. This event was held in conjunction with Engineer’s Week that many Oklahoma engineering societies participate in. A number of students also attended the banquet, including participants in Engineer for a Day, Future Ciies, and MATHCOUNTS programs.