Dr. Robert Michelson

Date : Friday 22^nd February, 7:00 PM IST

Dr Michelson is one among rare breed of scientists whose work opens up a multitude of vistas to innumerable fields of science and technology. He is the creator of The Entomopter - a multimode (flying/crawling) insect-like robot developed by him and his design team from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), University of Cambridge (England) and ETS Labs among others. He is also responsible for establishing the International Aerial Robotics Competition.

The Entomopter is a miniature flying device - propelled without combustion, and small enough to fit in one's palm. This ingenious device  that resembles a mechanical insect is based on a new development called a Reciprocating Chemical Muscle (RCM) which is capable of generating autonomic wing beating from a chemical energy source without any ignition, combustion or atmospheric oxygen. This unique feature enables it to fly even on Mars, despite all the NASA studies showing the atmospheric conditions on Mars to be adverse to flying.

Dr Michelson has had a stellar academic career, both as a student and as a professor at Georgia Institute of technology, where he taught courses in avionics for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Micro/Mini Air Vehicle (MAV) design at their School for Aersospace Engineering. He is also an internationally acclaimed scientist and researcher. In 1998 Dr. Michelson received the AUVSI Pioneer Award which is the highest level of recognition within the unmanned systems industry for technical contributions. Michelson is the recipient of the 2001 Pirelli Award for the diffusion of scientific culture given by an international Jury for the "best multimedia project coming from any educational institution in the world". For endeavors related to the Entomopter, he was also awarded the first €25,000 Top Pirelli Prize. Dr. Michelson is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Senior Member of the IEEE and a former President of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems (AUVSI) - the premier organisation for unmanned flight in America.

Be there at the Pragyan Curtain Raiser for a Question & Answer session via video-conference with one of the world's pre-eminent scientists. You can post any questions you might want to ask Dr. Michelson on the Guest Lectures forum. He will show during his Q&A session, slides and videos related to your questions if possible.