Professor Negrut's lab has worked on several projects aimed at improving the mobility of autonomous rovers operating in lunar conditions. In this context, the talk will cover two main topics: it presents an overview of terramechanics models in robotics, and it briefly describes the sensing used in lunar mobility simulations. The latter aspect involves simulating camera operations on the Moon for the autonomy stack design. All simulations are done in Project Chrono, an open-source multi-physics simulation platform (www.projectchrono.org/)


Dan Negrut received his Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Iowa. He spent six years working as a software developer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2004 he served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He spent 2005 as a Visiting Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division. At the end of 2005 Dan joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interests are in Computational Science, and he co-leads the Simulation-Based Engineering Lab (sbel.wisc.edu/). Dan received a National Science Foundation Career Award in 2009. Since 2010 he has been an NVIDIA CUDA Fellow. He is one of the technical leads of Project Chrono (www.projectchrono.org/). Check out their yearly conference at sbel.wisc.edu/magic/.

Faculty page: sbel.wisc.edu/negrut-dan/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dan-negrut-89320719/

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The mission of the ISTVS is to advance the knowledge of terrain-vehicle systems for improvements in engineering practice and for innovation. Since 1962.