Autonomy algorithms developed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) researchers could one day make cargo transport on the moon safer and more efficient for astronauts.
As part of a team led by MDA Space, Professor Tim Barfoot (UTIAS) and Alec Krawciw (UTIAS PhD student) are developing technology that will help Canada’s proposed Lunar Utility Vehicle (LUV) navigate between cargo drop-off points during future lunar missions — addressing a key transportation challenge once astronauts land on the moon.
“Lunar exploration involves a landing site and a habitat site about five kilometres apart,” says Barfoot, who is also director of the University of Toronto Robotics Institute.
“The landing site is flat for safe shuttle arrival, while the habitat needs to be shielded from radiation, typically behind rocky terrain. This creates a transportation challenge: astronauts must be able to move all cargo from the shuttle to the habitat.”
Unlike previous planetary missions where rovers explore terrain in multiple directions to collect data, the LUV will make regular round trips between fixed locations to deliver goods and equipment to astronauts. This marks the first time a space rover will be required to repeat the same path, making Barfoot’s visual teach-and-repeat (VT&R) navigation framework well-suited for the mission.
“Teach-and-repeat algorithms allow us to pilot the rover along a predetermined path by manually or physically driving it, and once it learns the path, it can automatically repeat the route as many times as you like,” says Barfoot.
“By automating this part of the mission, it saves astronauts time and energy returning to the landing site to pick up cargo, limits astronaut exposure to lunar elements and increases mission productivity.”
As part of his PhD research, Krawciw is adapting the self-driving technology for integration with the Canadian Space Agency’s (CSA) LUV test vehicle, the Lunar Exploration Light Rover (LELR).
In December 2024, Krawciw and Barfoot joined teams from MDA Space and the Centre de Technologies Avancées BRP at the University of Sherbrooke, at the CSA’s analogue terrain in Montreal, Quebec to trial the autonomy on the LELR.
The field test provided an opportunity for the teams to identify and address any hardware and software constraints when the vehicle is operating in lunar-like conditions.
“Adapting our code to the LELR came with some unexpected challenges,” says Krawciw.
“Simulating lunar conditions introduced a five-second delay in command and feedback, so we couldn’t rely on joystick control like we normally would. That pushed us to develop a new semi-autonomous teaching method using short path segments — something we hadn’t done before.”
“Despite the technical challenges, it’s always exciting to see something I worked on in the lab come to life in a real space-focused mission.”
After a successful field trial, the team was selected by the CSA in July 2025 to conduct an early-phase study for Canada’s proposed LUV as part of the CSA’s Lunar Surface Exploration Initiative. This will be the country’s next contribution to NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon.
As the team prepares the vehicle to be mission-ready, Krawciw is focused on enhancing the system’s readiness in long-duration deployments and improving its performance in real-world conditions.
“We learned a lot from running the system continuously in the field,” says Krawciw.
“It wasn’t just about getting the autonomy to work — it was about making it reliable and user-friendly for operators who might be using it all day, in tough conditions. That perspective is shaping how I approach the next phase of development.”
U of T Engineering’s self-driving car team aUToronto has once again taken the top spot at a prestigious international challenge — and notched a few personal bests as well.
The AutoDrive Challenge II invites ten teams from universities across North America to compete at the Mcity Test Facility in Ann Arbor, Mich. each June.
Though this year’s competition involved several new challenges and levels of difficulty, the team maintained their track record of success. As a bonus, a paper about the custom algorithm developed by the team members was accepted into Canada’s top conference on AI-robotics innovation.
“We’re always proud of the team, but to see them improve so much from year-to-year and for their hard work to be accepted for a conference publication really shows how beneficial club work can be for students’ professional goals,” says Professor Tim Barfoot (UTIAS), one of the academic advisors to the aUToronto team.
Each year, in late August, the competition releases a new set of rules and challenges. The team then has roughly 8 months to get to work before heading to the competition. Even for a team as experienced as aUToronto, each year comes with new surprises.
“There was a big jump in difficulty. I feel like this happens every other year and this year that jump was quite high compared to what had I experienced before,” says team captain Chad Paik, a PhD student at UTIAS.
One of this year’s biggest challenges also led to the team’s biggest success.
“With the Buy off Ride Challenge, essentially what happens is you start the car somewhere and then you have to hit six destination points out of a possible 30. The car has to go from one [destination] to the other, but the key here is that the challenge is almost 20 minutes long,” says team member Connor Wilson (Year 4 EngSci).
“Your car has to stay autonomous for 20 full minutes without hitting anything or without you having to take over. That raises the bar a lot, because previously they were five-to-ten-minute challenges.”
Not only did aUToronto receive the top score in this contest, but they were 150 points above second place.
All of the challenges are carried out with relatively low computing power in the car compared to some state-of-the-art systems — something the team says is both a hindrance and an advantage.
“I think that forces us to innovate in different ways,” says Wilson.
“For example, the [the planning and controls portion] that I worked on, there’s no AI involved, but I was still able to kind of find some novelty there.”
With pressure to remain on top after several years of wins, the team employed some new strategies.
“We had one milestone presentation [with faculty advisors] every two months. The desire for the students to showcase their abilities to the professors really help with keeping everybody in check,” says Paik.
The team was also committed to testing as early and as often as possible, with each of the different events they took part in giving them opportunities to demonstrate what they were working on.
While these demos were helpful, nothing prepared the team for what would happen at the competition.
“On the day of the competition, a hardware failure we had never experienced before happened… the computer just turned off. For the next challenge, the GPS unit also failed,” says Paik.
“We were devastated.”
Despite the setbacks, the team was able to fix both the computer and GPS at the last minute and move their run to the end of the day.
“To see them under that much stress, and not only support one another and pull through but do so well on that challenge. It’s an inspiring moment to witness and I hope they’re very proud,” says Professor Steven Waslander (UTIAS), academic advisor to the aUToronto team.
Wilson, Paik and others have published a paper that outlines the custom algorithms they developed for the planning and controls portion of the competition. The paper was presented at the 2025 Conference on Robotics and Vision, in Calgary, last spring.
Their work focuses on autonomous driving in busy urban environments by unifying path planning and vehicle control into a single framework. This hybrid approach ensures that route generation and execution are optimized for both safety and navigation.
This is the team’s seventh first-place finish in eight years. Both Wilson and Paik will return next year and are already anticipating the 2026 challenges.
“Autodrive is something where I think you get out exactly what you put in,” says Wilson.
“There’s a lot of opportunity to learn. The more time you’re spending on it, the more you’ll learn.”
This summer, Benjamin Humer (Year 4 EngSci) spent two weeks attending the Culham Plasma Physics Summer School in Oxfordshire, England. The trip was a culmination of months spent working with General Fusion, a Canadian startup focused on bringing clean, reliable energy through fusion technology to the grid by 2030.
“Everyone [from the company] was very excited that I was going,” says Humer.
“All the physicists were asking me about it and helping with the poster. It’s their life’s work. They get excited when someone young is excited about it and were all super supportive of the process.”
For Humer, tackling major engineering challenges in energy is part of a family legacy.
“My grandfather was an engineer who worked for BC Hydro, which allowed him to go all over the world and build hydroelectric dams,” says Humer.
“That seemed like an interesting way to help bring technology to people while still working on technical problems. That’s really what threw me into engineering.”
As a self-proclaimed “lego and physics kid,” Humer, who is originally from Vancouver, chose U of T for its EngSci program and because he was attracted to the idea of an uninterrupted co-op placement.
“The continuous co-op was a big draw instead of having it all sectioned off into little four-month chunks,” he says.
“I enjoyed being involved with all stages of a project, and in the 12 or 16 months of PEY Co-op, there is an opportunity to actually do that in a way you can’t in a shorter placement.”
Humer began working with General Fusion even before it was time to apply for his PEY Co-op placement. Starting in September 2023, he collaborated with researchers from the company as part of his undergraduate thesis, which focused on a key challenge in fusion energy: plasma formation.
The idea behind fusion is that atoms of light elements, such as hydrogen, get smashed together to form atoms of slightly heavier elements, such as helium. The process — the same one that powers the sun — releases tremendous amounts of energy but is extremely complicated to carry out in a controlled manner.
In most fusion reactors, the hydrogen fuel exists in the form of a plasma, a kind of super-heated fluid in which all the electrons have been stripped away. Because it would melt or destroy almost any material that could contain it, it must be held in place using magnetic fields.
“Imagine if you were holding plasma in a jar, but you couldn’t let a single particle of it escape and touch the edge,” he says.
“Like all fluids, the plasma will tend to expand to fill the entire volume of its container, so we have to use the magnetic fields to keep it from touching the walls.
“We had indications that instabilities were occurring, but we didn’t have confirmation what the specific instabilities were. I spent my time identifying the instabilities occurring and building a scientific basis for not only detecting these instabilities but also mitigating them in the future.”
Humer’s co-op with General Fusion began in May 2024. After just a few weeks, he found himself questioning some of his long held professional and personal ideas.
“I walked in thinking the problem was closer to solved than it was, which doesn’t discourage me from trying to solve it. There’s more meat on the bone from a scientific perspective,” he says.
As part of the Culham Plasma Physics Summer School, Humer got to present a poster outlining the progress he’s made so far. He also got to meet many other young scientists interested in fusion.
“It’s lots of fun to connect with a generation of people that are going to be solving very similar problems,” says Humer.
“Plasma physics is not a big field so to have met 70 people that are the same age — it’s cool headed into the future thinking I’m going to stay in the same field. Problems of this scale require a lot of experts working together. I would like to be one of those experts.”
With the support of General Fusion, Humer plans to bring an updated version of his research to the Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics in California this November. After graduating from U of T, he plans to apply to graduate school, studying either plasma physics or applied math, and eventually earn a PhD.
“One piece of advice I’ll give is doing something outside of your co-op that is going to be recharging or interesting,” says Humer.
“My PEY Co-op experience has been really improved by living somewhere that I really wanted to live. I wanted to come back to Vancouver and that’s been great. I think the secondary pieces of the decision are as important to your experience as the specific company that you’re working for.”
Earlier this week, the University of Toronto signed a multi-year partnership agreement with Nissan North America.
The partnership was facilitated by Climate Positive Energy, U of T’s centre for interdisciplinary clean energy research. It will accelerate both vehicle- and grid-related research and activity through a joint collaboration between Nissan, the University of Toronto’s Electric Vehicle (UTEV) Research Centre and the Grid Modernization Centre (GMC).
On August 26, Professor Timothy Chan (MIE), U of T’s Associate Vice-President and Vice-Provost, Strategic Initiatives, was joined by Atsushi Teraji, General Manager, EV System Laboratory, Nissan Motor Corp. Japan, for a signing ceremony at the historic Hart House.
Chris Scott, Ontario’s Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Energy and Mines, joined the ceremony and delivered remarks. Also in attendance were other senior members from both Nissan and U of T.
“Our strategic collaboration with Nissan is essential to developing breakthrough research in cleaner mobility and energy storage,” says Chan.
“This partnership will not only accelerate innovation, but also ensure that our research has real-world impact. We look forward to building solutions together that will shape the future of mobility for future generations.”
U of T’s vehicle research excellence is demonstrated through the UTEV Research Centre, a university-industry research hub focused on advancing the next generation of electric vehicle technologies.
Led by Professor Olivier Trescases (ECE), who is also principal investigator on the the new research project, UTEV supports the transition to sustainable transportation through research in EV power electronics, automotive semiconductors, battery systems and charging infrastructure. UTEV brings together researchers across departments and collaborates with industry, utilities and governments to address critical challenges in electrified transportation.
The collaboration will support a research initiative focused on enabling secure, scalable vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems in North America. V2G technology allows electric vehicles to both charge from and supply power back to the grid.
Using edge computing, the project will optimize smart charging and real-time energy management across electric vehicles, homes and the grid – laying the groundwork for a virtual power plant model that enhances grid reliability while protecting user privacy. This project will be accomplished as a collaboration between UTEV and the Grid Modernization Centre, and will be a living example of multi-disciplinary work at U of T.
This interdisciplinary research is supported by a strong ecosystem of student and faculty design teams, specialized laboratories and academic expertise. By collaborating with Nissan, U of T aims to accelerate the commercialization of solutions that can make EVs not only greener modes of transportation but also integral components of resilient, decentralized energy networks.
The project will also benefit from the expertise of Professor Baochun Li (ECE), whose research in artificial intelligence and federated learning will inform data-driven energy management approaches.
Nissan is a recognized leader in the mass-market EV space and recently launched the third generation of its LEAF electric car, which is now available with vehicle-to-load (V2L) connections, enabling LEAF to power small- to medium-sized devices from the vehicle’s battery. In other markets such as Japan, the all-new LEAF continues the nameplate’s ability to deliver vehicle-to-home (V2H) functionality, allowing it to supply electricity back to a home or receive solar generated energy.
Nissan’s continued investment into electric mobility includes ongoing research into V2X technologies that will allow EV batteries to serve as an essential part of sustainable energy sourcing. For example, EV owners could use their vehicles as mobile energy sources to power devices and even their homes during power outages, or to supply power back to the grid during peak demand situations to support balanced, greener energy generation. Through this new agreement, Nissan hopes to leverage U of T’s advanced research to enhance the performance, efficiency and real-world deployment of V2G systems worldwide.
“Electric vehicles have the potential to not only decarbonize everyday transportation for drivers, but also to serve as a crucial part of smarter, greener, stronger electrical grids for the future,” says Teraji.
“Collaborative research with the University of Toronto in this crucial field will help us develop real-world applications for the power of EVs and V2X technology.”
Nissan is the latest partner to join the Grid Modernization Centre, which has already engaged more than 50 partners from the energy eco-system including federal departments, industry and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), utilities, regulators, small- and medium-size enterprises, start-ups, and industry associations.
Nissan’s longstanding leadership in the electric vehicle space will enhance the new partnership by bringing valuable industry insights and real-world challenges that help ground academic research in practical applications, helping the Grid Modernization Centre advance Canada’s commitments to reaching net-zero by 2050.
“Ontario is proud to be the engine of Canada’s automotive and energy innovation,” says Parliamentary Assistant Chris Scott.
“This partnership between the University of Toronto and Nissan demonstrates how Ontario’s world-class post-secondary research is driving advances in clean energy and next-generation vehicles. By leveraging our unmatched talent and innovation, Ontario is strengthening the automotive sector, protecting good-paying jobs today and building the strongest, most resilient economy in the G7 for tomorrow.”
A new design for an e-bike storage facility — developed by engineering and architecture students at the University of Toronto — could help mitigate the impact of fires in battery-powered e-bikes and e-scooters.
The project is the latest in a long line of successful collaborations facilitated by Engineering Strategies and Practice (ESP), a first-year course that connects engineering students with real clients to design solutions to complex challenges.
Toronto Fire Services is a long-standing partner of ESP. Over the past several years, they have brought forward a number of projects related to the fire hazards posed by lithium-ion batteries. The technology powers everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, but remains largely unregulated in Canada.
Jim Chisholm, a fire protection engineer with Toronto Fire Services, has worked with student teams on over a dozen projects since 2016.
“Lithium-ion batteries are a relatively new technology, and it’s growing exponentially,” says Chisholm.
“But for things like e-bikes and scooters, there’s nothing saying batteries made without any certification in another country can’t come into Canada. And within the country, there’s nothing saying that somebody can’t produce a battery that has no certification either,” he says.
“It’s a bit like the Wild West.”
This lack of regulation has led to real-world consequences. Fires caused by faulty or damaged batteries are notoriously difficult to extinguish and can be devastating in residential or commercial settings.
Recognizing this, ESP students have pitched in to explore innovative solutions.
Victor Todorov, a student in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, was a part of a cross-disciplinary team composed of architecture and engineering students. Their project focused on the design of a secure storage pavilion for e-bikes and scooters on U of T’s St. George campus.
“Working with lithium-ion battery-powered vehicles, safety was a key consideration; maintaining proper storage, temperatures, docking and charging were all central to the design,” says Todorov.
“We also had to consider what preventive measures to take in the instance of a fire or explosion. For example, constructing the pavilion’s main walls — which face the nearby Robarts Library — out of reinforced concrete was a choice made to protect the building, as well as contain the fire in the event of a battery flare up.”
Another past ESP project that Chisholm had been involved in saw the design of a model e-bike store, which was prompted by a deadly fire in a New York City bike shop.
The team proposed a layout that separated key functions — retail, battery storage, repairs, and disposal — into distinct zones, helping to contain fires and reduce the risk to surrounding areas.
“Safety is the fundamental underpinning of any engineering project. As engineers, this should be our first consideration,” Chisholm says.
“One of the things I see working with students in ESP is that they come to a real understanding that these are issues that affect real people.
“They came up with a really thoughtful layout. It wasn’t just about fire suppression — it was about prevention, containment and practical usability. They were really thinking holistically.”
As lithium-ion batteries continue to proliferate, the need for thoughtful, safety-first engineering becomes more urgent. U of T engineering students are contributing to this push through ESP.
“ESP exposes students to the reality that engineering is about people right at the outset of their degree,” Chisholm says. “They’re applying their knowledge and getting valuable experience solving real problems.”
“Their reports go into our knowledge bank. They help us ask better questions, propose smarter strategies and sometimes even influence future regulations,” he says.
“The work that the ESP teams are doing is pathfinding. A lot of the issues they’re dealing with have shown possible gaps in regulations that may need to be addressed.”
Professor Milica Radisic (BME, ChemE) has been elected a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS), one of Canada’s three national academies. The CAHS leverages the expertise of Canada’s leading health sciences researchers to evaluate our most urgent and complex health challenges and recommend solutions. To be named a CAHS Fellow is considered one of the highest distinctions for academics in the health sciences in Canada.
Radisic is the Canada Research Chair in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering and a senior scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute. She is also director of the NSERC CREATE Training Program in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering & Entrepreneurship and a co-founder of the Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies.
Radisic is internationally recognized for spearheading the field of organ-on-a-chip engineering and pioneering new tissue vascularization approaches. She invented methods to grow and mature contractile heart tissues starting from human stem cells, providing platforms for developing and studying human tissues and organs. This heart-on-a-chip technology is key to enabling a paradigm switch from “one-size fits all” drug discovery and testing in animals, towards precise and tailored discovery and testing in human tissues.
To commercially translate this technology, Radisic co-founded TARA Biosystems with her students. The company grew to more than 20 employees before its acquisition by Valo Health in 2022. At Valo, Radisic’s IP is the engine for AI-powered drug discovery, where AI-designed drugs are tested and validated in human cardiac tissue. A second start-up, Quthero, was formed to commercialize unique regenerative peptide materials developed in her lab.
Already a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Radisic is one of only a handful of scholars to be elected to all three of Canada’s national academies. She is also a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the U.S. National Academy of Inventors.
In 2024, Radisic garnered the NSERC John C. Polanyi Award, for a recent outstanding scientific advance. Earlier this year she received a Governor General’s Innovation Award.
“Milica Radisic’s election to this prestigious institution, which makes her a member of all three of Canada’s national academies, demonstrates the incredible impact of her heart-on-a-chip technology across the fields of medicine and engineering,” says U of T Engineering Dean Christopher Yip.
“On behalf of the faculty, I congratulate her on this well-deserved honour.”