9355110 Lewis The purpose of this project is to provide traineeships for Ph.D. students to work with the Controls Group and the Intelligent Systems Group at the University of Texas at Arlington. The students who are selected to participate in this program will benefit from the collaboration between faculty and Electrical Engineering and in Computer Science and Engineering to further the state-of-the-art in robot planning and control. Students will also have the opportunities to perform their research at the University of Texas Automation and Robotics Research Institute (ARRI), and will have extensive interaction with representatives from international and industrial research labs. The University of Texas at Arlington is committed to increasing the participation of ethnic minorities and females in engineering careers. The proposed program continues these efforts to recruit minority and female engineers. As described in this proposal, we have established strong ties with the University of Texas at Brownsville and Grambling State University, and one of the principal investigators serves as the faculty advisor for the local chapter of the Society of Women Engineers and as a co-advisor for the local chapter of the Society of Hispanic Engineers. We propose to coordinate with these predominantly Hispanic, African-American, and women-based groups to recruit top students into our program. ***
