In The News

...As the 93d Air Ground Operations Wing (AGOW) Spartans celebrate their 10th anniversary, they usher in changes within their organization that will not only focus on being trained and ready today, but simultaneously prepare them for the evolving threats of the future....AGOW Battlefield Airmen recently partnered with the Air Force Research Lab and Georgia Tech Research Institute to jumpstart the push of innovation down to the warfighter.

Jonathan Rogers and his team are working on a funded project with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to test multiple vertical lift robots that connect up to deliver supplies. The robots are programed to take into account flexible logistics by connecting to the object (payload) and determining its weight and size and how to move it in a stable way. The small robots work together as a team, known as multi agent control.

Margarita Gonzalez, Branch Chief in the Socio-Technical Systems Division at Georgia Tech Research Institute, said she hears from many clients that they hate their software tool..."It's re-envisioning how you capture and structure critical data so it is more easily searchable and retrievable," Gonzalez said.

Ralph M. Herkert, director of the Medical Device Test Center at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in Atlanta, is working with manufacturers to help answer that question and improve the design of both the medical devices and the electronic article surveillance (EAS) systems that they pass through.

Gary V. McMurray, Associate Director, Collaborative Robotics, Georgia Tech Research Institute, says, “the rapid expansion of drones in farming has been impressive, but I’ve also been concerned with their inability to address the amount of time and cost required by the grower to use these tools.”

The mission is so perilous that the National Science Foundation passed on funding it, leaving its future uncertain until the Paul G. Allen Philanthropies foundation stepped in with a donation of nearly $2 million. “It’s a very risky prospect,” says Mick West, an engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute who dropped a tethered robot through Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf in 2016. 

Members of the Development Authority of Cobb County gave their final approval Thursday to the issuance of nearly $56.9 million in bonds to allow Georgia Tech to expand operations on part of Marietta’s Lockheed Martin campus. The Atlanta-based university had sought the bonds to buy 32 acres on the northern portion of Lockheed’s property adjacent to Dobbins Air Reserve Base and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, an applied research arm of the school. The funds will also go toward construction, renovations, and equipment at four existing buildings on the site to provide additional research space.

Georgia Tech wants to double the size of its Marietta footprint by buying and renovating an additional 52 acres from Lockheed Martin for nearly $63 million. Georgia Tech officials pitched the project to the University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents on Tuesday. The proposal would expand its Cobb research facility to 104 acres. The expansion of the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Cobb campus is expected to add about 500 jobs to the 300-or-so existing positions at the campus along Atlanta Road.

Delta Air Lines officially opened its new Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility at Georgia Tech Thursday. In a story by Lance Wallace on the Georgia Tech website, school president G.P. “Bud” Peterson says that in this facility, “our students, faculty, staff and researchers will be able to develop products, and it provides Delta an opportunity to collaborate with its partners.” According to the story, the facility was made possible by a $3 million gift from the Delta Air Lines Foundation.

“Yes, we’re concerned about the cuts in the EPA” and the Department of Energy, said Stephen Cross, the executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. “But I think science is going to be well funded. What a wonderful opportunity for us to start communicating the impact of what we’re going to do over the next four years. Shame on us if we don’t do it.” Cross added that an unseen benefit to the Republicans’ preference toward cutting regulations could be that burdens on universities and research are lifted.

A research team at Georgia Tech was studying how the fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) were building a tower, according to a press release. They only planned to record for two hours while the critters formed the tower—but the camera rolled for three.They assumed that there would be nothing to see once the ants assembled the writhing tower. But as researcher Craig Tovey tells Charles Q. Choi at LiveScience, his colleague Nathan Mlot “was too good a scientist to discard data." Even so, it seemed like a waste of time to watch an hour of nothing. "So he played the video at several times regular speed.”While fast forwarding, Mlot noticed that the ants forming the tower were not stationary as the researchers believed. Instead, the tower was in very slow, constant motion with the column of ants slowly sinking, like butter melting.

The Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) offers the latest example with its study of fire ant towers—structures that resemble the Eiffel Tower and are seemingly built without a leader or coordinated effort. "If you watched ants for 30 seconds, you could have no idea that something miraculous would be created in 20 minutes," says David Hu, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Mechanical Engineering in a statement. "With no planning, and using trial-and-error, they create a bell-shaped structure that helps them survive."

Georgia Tech engineers Glaucio Paulino and Jerry Qi wanted to apply tensional advantages to objects that could be used for more than just bridges and antennae, such as space habitats or heart stents. Paulino and Qi devised a method to create 3D printable, lightweight, foldable versions of these designs, with tubes made of a plastic-like material called a shape memory polymer connected with printed elastic tendons.

Uranus’ magnetosphere swivels, switching its invisible armor on-and-off, according to new work from the Georgia Institute of Technology. While “quirky” barely begins to describe these magnetic forces, Uranus’ situation may signify the norm across the cosmos and be key to refining our search for habitable worlds.“The scientific community wants to go back to Uranus, in light of all these exoplanet discoveries,” Carol Paty, a Georgia Tech planetary scientist who led the project, told NewsHour. “A large fraction of these exoplanets are Uranus, Neptune in size.”

The meniscus-assisted solution printing (MASP) technique boosts power conversion efficiencies to nearly 20 percent by controlling crystal size and orientation.The process, which uses parallel plates to create a meniscus of ink containing the metal halide perovskite precursors, could be scaled up to rapidly generate large areas of dense crystalline film on a variety of substrates, including flexible polymers.“We used a meniscus-assisted solution printing technique at low temperature to craft high quality perovskite films with much improved optoelectronic performance,” said Zhiqun Lin, a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Researchers at Georgia Tech and the Piedmont Heart Institute in Atlanta are using new 3D printing technologies to help cardiologists predict whether paravalvular leakages could occur after valve replacement surgery. Leakages are a common complication when the valve doesn’t precisely fit, and researchers hope to avoid it with this new medical innovation.The team creates 3D-printed models from CT scans of patients’ hearts, which yield patient-specific heart valve models that mimic the physiological qualities of the real valves. Cardiologists can then evaluate how well a prosthetic valve fits a patient before the start of a surgery.

Researchers at Georgia Tech developed a flu-vaccine patch. Instead of one big needle, it has lots of microscopic needles. Patients just press it onto their skin and wait a few minutes for it deliver the medication, during which they reportedly don’t feel a thing.

In the wake of a transnational cyberattack that was initially reported in Ukraine and quickly spread across the world on June 27, the second of its kind in as many months, the security of personal information stored in cyberspace is increasingly cause for concern. “It’s especially a problem given the ubiquitous nature of devices collecting data,” Erica Briscoe, a chief scientist in the ATAS Laboratory at Georgia Tech Research Institute and one of the authors of the Big Data report, said in opening remarks. Schukai said that while “we’ve been in this amazing technology change over the last twenty years… everything tech can do sits about ten to fifteen years beyond where law and policy sits.”  

Currently, farmers can use precision ag to construct 2-D images or even 3-D reconstructions of their fields. But a collaborative research project from three Georgia institutions wants to take these monitoring tools into the fourth dimension. Researchers from Georgia Tech Research Institute, the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology equipped a standard tractor with sensors to track color imaging, GPS, inertial measurement and other data from a peanut field in Tifton, Ga. Researchers ran 23 sessions in 89 days collecting a total of 36 million data points during the 2016 growing season.

The Georgia Institute of Technology has been approved to offer a new advanced degree program for the emerging field of machine learning.In a unanimous vote, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia approved Georgia Tech’s request to establish a Doctor of Philosophy in Machine Learning.The machine learning (ML) Ph.D. program is a collaborative venture between the colleges of Computing, Engineering, and Sciences. An inaugural class of approximately 15 students is scheduled to convene for the Fall 2017 semester. The class is expected to comprise incoming Ph.D. students and some who may have recently begun other programs at Georgia Tech.