Sarah Harris, associate professor in the UNLV Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will speak at an upcoming Virtual Science Café Las Vegas. Her virtual presentation is titled, "Robotics, Processors, and Human Interfaces."

Robotics and electronics are embedded in everything we do. Until recently, robotic devices – particularly sensors and actuators – operated as silos of information. With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), we are increasingly living in a sea of electronics, which responds to us and to which we respond. For example, a current project Harris is working on uses SPaT (signal phase and timing) information generated from a traffic controller to aid self-driving vehicles minimize wait time, decrease the chance of accidents, and increase fuel efficiency. While many traffic light signals, including those in Las Vegas, transmit this information, few vehicles receive or use this information. We are building a device that interfaces a radio receiver with a microcontroller as a lightweight display device to receive SPaT information and characterize the device's performance in terms of phase accuracy, delay, and distance.

The virtual presentation will be presented via Zoom.