Professor’s goal: Make UNLV a hotbed for robotics

By Brian Nordli

Friday, Sept. 26, 2014 | 2 a.m.

For the past 14 years, Paul Oh has been working with students at Drexel University to turn science fiction into reality.

His specialty is robotics. His projects include designing a flying ambulance to rescue people injured in disasters, developing a field of indoor flying robots to help first responders and creating HUBO the humanoid.

The latter is a robot the size of a 5-year-old and is his team’s vision for the future of disaster response. It can clear debris, drive a utility vehicle, climb ladders and break through walls with a tool.

Oh and a team of students from several universities developed it for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency robotics challenge, a competition against the top robotics developers in the country. Oh's team was among 16 in the trials.

Now, Oh will bring his robotics expertise to UNLV, in a state the Federal Aviation Administration has designated as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) test site. The professor arrived in Las Vegas with his robots and lab five weeks ago. He serves as a Lincy Professor of Unmanned Aerial Systems at UNLV and will start classes in the spring.

In a recent interview, Oh discussed robots, his program at UNLV and the future.

What attracted you to Las Vegas?

I’ve had a very successful career at Drexel, but I started to think about what I wanted to do in the second half of my career. I believe it is more about making an impact and having significance on a larger scale. Then UNLV approached me right after they got the FAA Test Center designation. That answered my question. Not only could it have a regional impact, it could be national and global. So I decided to uproot my family and my lab and come out here to see what I can do.

What will you be working on?

Beyond just building a lab and training students, we wanted to take it up a few steps. The vision is to have an unmanned systems institute that will train the next generation of academics and industrial professionals in that field.

What will the students be learning in the spring semester?

The focus is on long-term education, because technologies come and go. It won’t be for a very specific UAV engineer. It’s important to be mindful of what’s happening, but how do you apply your core disciplines toward this? That will pay much more dividends for our students.

Where do you see robotics going in the next five to 10 years and why?

The big market will be material handling. It is something all industries understand, from the farmer doing agricultural crop care to the hotels doing the food handling to the warehouses dealing with distribution. How can robots help accelerate material handling to meet with customer demand? I see that’s on the horizon in the next seven to 10 years.

Will it only be UAVs, or are there other types of robotics in development?

Think about the PC market when it first came out in the 1980s. People thought maybe there are about five applications. Nobody thought there’ll be social media and all these other applications. With robotics, you want it to do things for you other than just providing photos. What I’m interested in is using UAVs to fix and repair infrastructure.

Is there anything else Las Vegas should be looking toward in the field of UAVs?

There is no absence of enthusiasm for UAVs here, but I don’t see anything they can sink their teeth into. The rocket is on its launching pad, we’re all excited, but no trigger is being pulled. There is nothing to sink your teeth into except the DARPA robotics challenge. This is very concrete. We have nine months to go to finals, and it’s a way to get all this enthusiasm channeled into something that makes Vegas very proud of their contributions. We need something to rally around.