During the first visit to my friend’s house since the pandemic had started, the first thing I did was wash my hands. The first thing I noticed was the eye-catching shape of the water projecting from the faucet. While the sinks I had used for the past year emitted frothy, turbulent jets, the water in this sink fell over a flat edge and created a laminar cascade of water that appeared to take the shape of mutually orthogonal chain links.

In fifth grade, I joined a FIRST Lego League robotics team, and although my team of all first-years placed dead-last at our first ever competition, I was completely hooked. This was the beginning of my obsession with robotics. I would go on to do 8 years of FIRST robotics, through 12th grade … Having seen my programmer-teammates code elaborate autonomous routines and automations for the robots I designed, I naturally became curious about the software that controlled the robots as well.

The objective of the research project was to create a vision-based system to monitor a robot’s movements in real-time. The system provides a mechanism to monitor the control system’s function and check that there are no errors in the system. Video feed captured by a camera (Microsoft Kinect sensor) is compared to how the robot is supposed to function at a particular instant of time to determine any discrepancies using image comparison.

In this paper, I describe the process and results of my study on the flight trajectory optimization of a continuously flying solar aircraft. Continuous flight is achieved by cyclic operation, where the trajectory is repeated indefinitely, typically every 24 hours. The word continuously is used in the theoretical sense, as continuous or perpetual flight is not achievable in practice due to degradation of batteries and aircraft components over time. The importance of flight trajectory optimization has been recognized in both general aviation and space applications.

My inspiration came at breakfast one day, when CNN switched to a story about the Icelandic volcanic eruption that had grounded air traffic across Europe (due to the abrasive, potentially explosion-causing action that debris has in engines). My immediate thought was, “Someone should fix that.” … I always am asked whether foreign object damage, FOD, is really that major a problem, because most people have seen a few news reports on jets crash-landing after bird strikes or other major accidents, but they don’t know that thousands of these incidents, albeit more minor, happen yearly.

Certain arthropods such as the water strider and the fisher spider have acquired the unique ability to walk on the surface of the water by exploiting the phenomenon of surface tension that occurs at the airwater interface. Water striders and other water-walking arthropods distribute their weight between supporting legs, creating dimples in the water’s surface without penetrating it. These dimples push against the weight of the water strider because the water is trying to return to its original state.