UC San Diego Jorge Cortes and his team at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering recently won a nearly $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop control systems for “swarms” of miniature robots that could one day help predict where ocean currents will carry oil spills. The engineers are leading the development of the control systems for swarms of small, inexpensive, underwater robotic ocean drifters that researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego are designing, building and deploying. Online registration is here.