Research Projects

Timeframe: June 2019 - December 2019
Part of Modlab (member of GRASP LAB)

The Modboat is a modular robotic boat powered by a single motor. The motor spins a bottom plate to which are attached two free-swinging flaps. By precisely controlling the rotation of the bottom plate, it is possible to make the robot swim forward and make turns, even in place. This represents the first step towards modular floating sysetms by creating a low-cost, simple, and maneuverable modular unit.

The Modboat is controlled by an ESP32 attached to a lasercut frame contained in an acrylic tube. The flipper asembly on the bottom is 3D printed. A central computer runs a MATLAB script which receives position data from a motion capture system and then transmits the parameters for the swimming motion necessary to reach the desired waypoint.
During the project, I was part of a two person team, designing and fabricating the flippers and parts of the frame, programming the swimming behavior, running experiments, and analyzing telemetry data to find a piecewise linear relation between one of the swimming parameters and robot turning rate.

Timeframe: June 2019 - December 2019
Part of Modlab (member of GRASP LAB)

Quori is an open-source, low-cost robotic platform for allowing researchers to study Human-Robot Interaction. It has a holonomic base, an actuated waist, a pair of 2-DOF arms, and a rear-projected face. Sensing is acheived through a mix of RGBD cameras and LIDAR. In this specific implementation, Quori is capable of turing to follow the closest person, mimicking the arm motions of a person, bowing, dancing, and emoting with different facial expressions.

As part of an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art about the future, the Modlab contributed Quori, to interact with patrons at the museum. The exhibit is Designs for Different Futures, on display from October 22, 2019 to March 8, 2020. Click here for an article about Quori in the exhibit.
Over the course of five months, I worked as part of team to add perception, decision making, and physical behaviors to Quori. My roles included programming the physical behaviors using trajeory generators and a robotic puppet, managing the git repository, creating documentation for the various software and hardware components, tracking team members' progress, setting team goals, and planning meetings.

Timeframe: August 2018 - June 2019
Part of ScalAR Lab (member of GRASP LAB)

In order to assess the affects of delay on swarm robotic systems, I generalized an existing swarm model by adding collision avoidance to it and characterizing the new swarm behavior through simulations I performed in MATLAB. I also conducted mixed reality experiments whereby a few physical robots interacted with many virtual agents. In these experiments, the robots were miniature Autonomous Surface Vehicles (mASVs), small differential drive boats, that moved about in a water tank. I tuned a PID controller and used a feedback linearization to allow the boats to respond to holonomic motion commands. I used a motion capture system to provide localization and tracking. The tracked positions of the boats was fed into the simulation which would in turn give commands to the boats after calculating the interactions between all agents, physical and virtual. The physical and virtual agents moving in sync validates the findings from previously conducted simulations.
In order to visualize the swarm interactions, I wrote a program using MATLAB's computer vision toolbox to combine video footage of the experiments in the water tank and video output from the simulation as seen in the picture. During this process, I calculated camera intrinsic parameters and then created a system for deriving the camera extrinsic parameters for each video which could be filmed from a number of positions.

Timeframe: September 2015 - June 2016
Part of Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab

To facilitate the development of the soft robotic actuator listed in the next section, I designed and built a mechanical tester to speed up data collection of the properties of the various actuator designs we were investigating. Consisting of a motor actuated linear stage and a force sensor, the mechanical tester was designed to be simple, cheap, and easy to build so that it could be used by hobbyists wishing to get involved with soft-robotics.

I wrote an paper for the Robot Makers 2 workshop at Robotics: Science and Systems 2016 where I presented.

View the paper

Timeframe: June 2015 - June 2016
Part of Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab

Working with a PhD student, we set out to make a soft robotic actuator to act as a leg in a quadrupedal robot. To this end the actuator had to be easy to manufacture, have a high strength to weight ratio, possess two degrees of freedom, and be capable of large deflections. The actuator we settled on took the form of four silicone tubes attached in the shape of a three-pointed star and could be made with a single casting.
Using three of these actuators, we made a dexterous gripper capable of rotating objects in its grasp with out the need of a wrist as well as handling a variety of objects, from heavy to fragile, with the same control scheme.