Two graduate students win Taiwan fellowship

Mechanical engineering graduate students Heng-Sheng Chang and Kuan-Chieh Lu recently won the Government Scholarship to Study Abroad, a fellowship funded by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. The fellowship encourages exceptional doctoral students to study abroad in STEM and other fields.

Chang and Lu will receive two years of funding to support their research based on their individual proposals. They will also interact with other fellowship recipients through the Taiwan Global Professional and Scholar Networking system, connecting with other scholars in their field and bringing their unique experiences back to Taiwan.  

Chang came to MechSE as a graduate student in 2018 with funding from a Gauthier Fellowship. He joined Professor Prashant Mehta’s lab just a few weeks after arriving at UIUC and is currently a PhD candidate. For the last several years, he has focused on the Office of Naval Research (ONR)-funded CyberOctopus project, in which he is helping to build a simulated octopus robot that can perform behaviors including fetching, crawling, and swimming. Chang uses an energy shaping control algorithm to enable muscles in the octopus’s arm to perform reaching and grasping motions. The team hopes to mimic neural activities, including motor and sensory neurons, to further understand the actions of real octopuses. 

Lu is a second-year doctoral student in mechanical engineering. He has been working with Assistant Professor Chenhui Shao to research quality control and real-time controllers of manufacturing processes. In the lab, they use machine learning techniques to model various complex processes and provide a control strategy to compensate for the environmental disturbances in real-world scenarios. Their overall goal is to improve the quality and efficiency of a manufacturer.