Gupta research group wins three awards at ASME IDETC/CIE

Congratulations to Professor S.K. Gupta (ME/ISR), his alumni and students, who won three awards at the 2013 ASME Computers and Information in Engineering Conference in Portland, Ore.

Gupta received the ASME Computers and Information in Engineering Division's Excellence in Research Award.

Gupta, his postdoctoral researcher Krishna Kaipa, Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. student Carlos Morato and B. Zhao received the Computer Aided Product and Process Development Technical Committee's 2013 Prakash Krishnaswami Best Paper Award for "Safe human robot interaction by using exteroceptive sensing based human modeling."

Alumnus Atul Thakur (ME Ph.D. 2011), now an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, received the ASME Computers and Information in Engineering Division's 2013 Best Dissertation Award.

Thakur's dissertation, "Physics-Aware Model Simplification for Interactive Virtual Environments," presents computational methods for improving the speed of rigid body simulations that are 40 times faster than existing techniques. Thakur's approach is based on model simplification and graphics processing unit (GPU) parallel computing techniques and showed how these methods could be applied to unmanned surface vehicles.

Improving the speed of simulations creates a more realistic virtual environment for testing objects like unmanned surface vehicles or procedures such as a complex surgery before being used in real-world applications. "Either exposing trainees or users directly to a physical system is risky for the operator or the physical system itself," Thakur said.

Thakur wrote several research papers based on his dissertation – one was published in Computer-Aided Design and won the Elsevier 2012 Most Cited Paper Award along with alumnus Ashis Banerjee, Ph.D. '09, mechanical engineering, and Professor S.K. Gupta, who also served as Thakur’s advisor and mentor.

Published August 9, 2013