The 2016 World Automation Congress (WAC), which took place July 31-August 4 in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, was dedicated to mechanical engineering professor Del Tesar.
The honor acknowledged Tesar for “structuring the Next Wave of Technology based on intelligent actuators and criteria-based decision making to satisfy human needs for a wide range of open architecture electro-mechanical systems (orthotics, vehicles, aircraft, ships, robots).”
The “Next Wave of Technology" presents a vision for the future of mechanical engineering and illustrates a new revolution in mechanical systems — based on electro-mechanical actuators with plug-and-play replacement possibilities — that would create more intelligent machines. The actuator array responds to commands derived from sensor data to inform a criteria-based decision process (unique to each application domain) in one to 10 milliseconds for systems such as smart trucks, intelligent cars, surgical robots, and more.
Tesar gave an honoree lecture at WAC 2016 on the establishment of a revolutionary, open architecture orthotics/prosthetics/mobile assist program to support the physically disabled population in the U.S., many of whom are veterans.
WAC is an international non-profit technical meeting dedicated to the dissemination of latest information among all nations of the world. Its five “tracks” include robotics, manufacturing and systems engineering, intelligent automation and control, soft computing (computational intelligence), and multi-media/image processing/bio-medical engineering.
Tesar joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 1985 and holds the Carol Cockrell Curran Chair in Engineering. He is also director of the Robotics Research Group, the longest standing Robotics Research Group in the country.
He has been recognized for his role in creating an open architecture for mechanical systems (robots, manufacturing cells, surgical systems, automobiles, etc.) that depends on standardized actuators of ever-increasing performance-to-cost ratios to operate all systems assembled on demand using universal system software for each application domain.
