Keaton Safu<\/p>\n
Keaton Safu was 9 when his mom brought home his first Star Wars Lego set. He poured out a scatter of pieces, smoothed out the instruction booklet and clicked his way forward until he was holding an Imperial starship.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t the biggest one,\u201d said Safu \u2014 nothing like the hulking collector ships that eat dining-room tables \u2014 \u201cbut it was definitely like I had a spaceship in my hands.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dozens of Lego sets, STEM courses and design projects later, Safu is finishing his mechanical engineering degree at Cal State Long Beach while working in the College of Engineering<\/a>\u2019s future-forward PACK Lab<\/a> \u2014 CSULB’s new testbed for multi-agent systems, where student\u2013written code sends collaborative drones and robots into motion as high-tech cameras track everything in real time.<\/p>\n How PACK labs work<\/p>\n Named for the way wolves move together, PACK (Perception, Actuation, Control and Network) focuses on swarms of drones and fleets of vehicles that sense one another and make intelligent decisions together without a central computer. Think merging vehicles that negotiate the right of way, much like flocks of birds changing course midair.\u00a0<\/p>\n The potential applications are as varied as they are exciting: fewer traffic collisions, faster environmental monitoring, smarter search-and-rescues, safer wildfire response.\u00a0<\/p>\n That last one hits home for Safu.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe just saw the Palisades and Eaton fires,\u201d said Safu, who grew up in Cerritos, less than 40 miles from burn zones. \u201cWhat might have happened if you had an autonomous network of drones that could fly over those fires and extinguish them? You’re minimizing the risk at that point. That makes the job safer for everybody involved and potentially changes the outcome of the situation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Associate Professor Oscar Morales-Ponce mentors Fozhan Babaeyian Ghamsari, a fourth-year international student from Iran who is planning to pursue her PhD. Their work includes teaching robots how to reach agreement when possible and default to safety when communications break down.<\/p>\n Where talent takes off<\/p>\n Backed by a recent Department of Defense grant, PACK Lab Director Tairan Liu (Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering)<\/a> and Associate Professor Oscar Morales-Ponce (Computer Engineering & Computer Science<\/a>) have built out a scaled, netted flight cage with research-grade AUVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), ground vehicles, a micro-swarm, an optical motion-tracking system and an indoor range for multi-car scenarios.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n What students do with it is the point. Undergrads turn class concepts into working systems \u2014 designing the logic that guides a robot\u2019s decisions, testing it on hardware and running experiments that translate directly to internships, jobs and graduate study.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI will design new lectures for my students to do some hands-on learning [and] design on their own,\u201d Liu said. \u201cWe follow\u2026 physics rules, procedures, quality control. We do things in a systematic way.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0PACK Lab Director Tairan Liu runs simulations with one of his engineering students.<\/p>\n Building more than robots<\/p>\n