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Team #12 Cincinnati Bearcats
July 23, 2007

Team #12 on my list is the Cincinnati Bearcats.



In my searching for where robotics is headed, I have run into Ernie Hall several times at robotics contests and technical conferences.  He is Cincinnati Bearcats team leader and faculty advisor.  While he has a very long academic title and a very long string of letters after his name as many of the people I have met do, he wears it all a bit differently.  It is obvious as soon as you meet him that his main focus is his students and what they can gain in knowledge from their participation in the various robotics events.  While most team leaders focus on the technology and winning the contest as you would expect, in everything he does he demonstrates that his main concern is the education of his students and how participation prepares his students for life beyond college.  He is more interested in launching his students into rewarding and meaningful careers than winning any one contest.   That is why I was not surprised to hear that when he won the Microsoft "Made in Express" Contest grand-prize he donated the cash to the University of Cincinnati DARPA Urban Challenge Team.

At one of the conferences we attended, he pointed out that I had missed a particularly important presentation on funding and gave me his copy of the handout saying that he would manage without it.  The handout was on CRADAs – Cooperative Research and Development Agreements.  He used a CRADA to get the experimental Jeep that his DARPA Urban Challenge team is using from TACOM.



Ernest L. Hall, FSME, PhD, PE, CME  - Also Knows As - University of Cincinnati Bearcats DARPA Urban Challenge Team Leader, Faculty Advisor, the Paul E. Geier Professor of Robotics at the Center for Robotics Research, University of Cincinnati, ,  Director, Center for Robotics Research.

Posted by Paul Grayson on July 23, 2007 | Comments (0)