News Archives

Mechanical engineering student receives AFRL Outstanding Scholar Award

September 20, 2021 - by Kim Delker

Elijah Wyckoff, a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Outstanding Scholar Award for his work on augmented reality for real-time telepresence and control of robotics.

Photo: Elijah Wyckoff and Fernando Moreu
Elijah Wyckoff and Fernando Moreu

Wyckoff spent the summer as scholar on a new interface for controlling and visualizing a robotic arm in augmented reality for satellite operation, being conducted in the Smart Management of Infrastructure Laboratory (SMILab) and the Center for Advanced Research Computing at The University of New Mexico.

The UNM principal investigator of this AFRL Scholar Summer project is Wyckoff’s adviser and thesis chair, Fernando Moreu, assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering. Christopher D. “Chrispy” Petersen is the principal investigator in the AFRL Space Logistics and Robotics Group and the Autonomous Guidance and Control Lead and the Bus-replica of ON-orbit Systems for Advanced Integration (BONSAI) Lead. Peterson is also a member of Wyckoff’s master’s thesis committee. The other two faculty members of his thesis committee are Rafael Fierro from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Claus Danielson from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.