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Grad Student Wins Best Paper at International Engineering Conference

January 8, 2019

graduate student Thomas Thayer presented and won the best paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE.Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate student Thomas Thayer presented and won the best paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) in Germany from among more than 400 submissions.

Thayer, a Ph.D. candidate in Professor Stefano Carpin’s lab, is the first author of “Multi-Robot Routing Algorithms for Robots Operating in Vineyards,” a publication that focuses on the Robot Assisted Precision Irrigation Delivery project (RAPID), a scalable irrigation-management solution that aims to help vine growers with water conservation efforts while improving yield and quality. Thayer co-authored the paper with Carpin and professors Stavros Vougioukas from UC Davis and Ken Goldberg from UC Berkeley.

The best paper award is given annually to the author(s) of a paper that “contributed to the notable advancement in automation research: abstractions, algorithms, theory, methodologies and models that improve efficiency, productivity, quality and reliability of machines and systems operating in structured environments over extended periods, or that improve the explicit structuring of environments where machines and systems operate.”

In 2017, Thayer participated in UC Merced’s inaugural cohort of the National Research Training Interdisciplinary Computational Graduate Education (ICGE) program funded by the National Science Foundation. The program aims to increase student success and reduce graduate student attrition rates in the computational sciences by fostering computational and data analytic skills within an interdisciplinary framework.