SMR IGERT students present at AMAM 2015

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 14:59:09 -0400

Three SMR IGERT students, all PhD candidates in Mechanical Engineering, presented poster sessions at the 7th International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Machines and Animals, which was held at MIT in June 2015. Max Hill presents "Structural Vibration for Robotic Communication and Sensing on One-Dimensional Structures" (Hill, M, Mekdara, P., Trimmer, B., & White, R.D.), which describes his team's work on the development of a robotic platform that can interpret vibrations in its substructure to make navigational decisions about its environment. Ultimately, Max hopes to develop a technology that will enable robots to communicate with each other via substrate vibration. Nikolas Kastor presented "A Synthetic Microswimmer with an Acoustically-Actuated Flagellum" (Kastor, N., Guasto, J. S., & White, R.D.), which proposes a model for a tiny flexible-flagella robotic swimmer that is actuated and imaged by medical ultrasound fields. Such a device could serve as a platform from which to perform tasks at the micro scale while swimming through a fluidic environment. Whitney Crooks presented "Using Social Media to Crowdsource Strategies for Soft- Bodied Robots" (Crooks, W., Rogers, C., & Trimmer, B.). Whitney's work is aimed at collecting and analyzing large amounts of data, generated by users logged into a Softworm Control Arena via one of the social media such as Facebook, with a goal of generating effective control strategies for deformable robots.