Back row, left to right: Ryan Coe, graduate student; Brian McCarter, graduate student; Craig Woolsey, associate professor of aerospace and ocean engineering; Leigh McCue, assistant professor of aerospace and ocean engineering; Andrew Bloxom, graduate student ; and Wayne Neu, associate professor of aerospace and ocean engineering. Front row, left to right: Van Jones and Ryan Hubbard, graduate students. The group participated in the recent Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) on Dynamics and Control of Manned and Unmanned Marine Vehicles symposium in Barranquilla and Cartagena, Colombia.
Virginia Tech College of Engineering faculty members and graduate students researchers recently returned from Colombia after participating in the Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) on Dynamics and Control of Manned and Unmanned Marine Vehicles.
Hosted by the Universidad del Norte and Escuela Naval ‘Almirante Padilla’ (the Colombian Naval Academy), participants studied techniques for controlling, modeling and predicting the motions of marine vehicles -- a particularly challenging subject given the size and complexity of the systems and the powerful natural forces marine vehicles face.
The two-week program held in Barranquilla and Cartagena, was headed by Leigh McCue-Weil, assistant professor in the department of aerospace and ocean engineering (AOE) at Virginia Tech, and Professor Marco Sanjuan of Universidad del Norte. McCue-Weil and fellow Virginia Tech faculty members Wayne Neu and Craig Woolsey, both AOE associate professors, served as lecturers.
The June 28-July 9 event primarily was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. International participants came from Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Spain and the United States, with U.S. Navy civilians and Colombian Naval officers, including a Colombian naval admiral participating. Event highlights included a view of the Rio Magdalena from the deck of a buoy tending boat, a tour of the COTECMAR shipyard in Cartagena, and a visit to a Colombian Coast Guard facility where participants saw semi-submersible drug-running vessels captured by Colombian authorities.
“By encouraging discussion, education and collaboration through this Institute, we formed a stronger collective understanding of the dynamic behavior of vessels in marine environments as well as control system solutions” McCue-Weil said. Additionally, the symposium “brought together scholars of the Americas from traditionally disparate sectors of the maritime field, and highlighted opportunities for use of unmanned vehicles in K-12 and undergraduate education.”
Participating Virginia Tech graduate students included Andrew Bloxom, Ryan Coe, Ryan Hubbard and Van Jones, all of AOE, and Brian McCarter of electrical and computer engineering. Rosa Avalos, an AOE undergraduate major, “was a critical part of the PASI planning and organization, including participating in a site visit to Colombia,” said McCue-Weil.
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