UC Berkeley News: UC Berkeley is teaming up with NASA’s Ames Research Center and SKS developers to create research space for companies interested in collaborating with UC Berkeley and NASA scientists to generate futuristic innovations in aviation, space exploration, and how we live and work in space.

The Berkeley Space Center aims to accommodate up to 1.4 million square feet of research space on 36 acres of land at NASA Ames’ Moffett Field. “We would like to create industry consortia to support research clusters focused around themes as aviation of the future, resiliency in extreme environments, space bioprocess engineering, remote sensing and data science and computing,” said Alexandre Bayen, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) and the associate provost for Moffett Field program development.

Claire Tomlin, EECS professor and chair at UC Berkeley, who conducted her first research on automated collision avoidance systems for drones at Moffett Field, said, “With our new aerospace engineering major, it is the right time to get started at Moffett Field. It offers an outdoor testbed for research on drones or other unpiloted aerial vehicles, used increasingly for aerial inspection or delivery, into our air traffic control system,” she said. Tomlin envisions research on networks of vertiports to support operations of electric autonomous helicopters or e-VTOLs.

Both Bayen and Tomlin are C3.ai DTI Principal Investigators, in cybersecurity and energy/climate, respectively.

Read more here.

Image: Artist’s rendering of NASA’s Ames Research Center and Moffett Field showing the future location of the Berkeley Space Center (gray buildings stretching from center to right), for UC Berkeley.