Growing up reading Isaac Asimov’s robot series, I always envisioned a future where mobile robots will run around helping humans. Of course, this has not happened, and I realized that there are many difficulties to achieving my dream future-cost, energy use, technical difficulties, etc. Although I did not have any significant experience with robotics, I have always been involved with maker technology, both through reading research and news articles and through making smaller-scale gadgets. So, in my project, I wanted to create a robot that addresses some of the most prominent challenges in robotics.

Recall that the problem statement of my project is to quickly and autonomously navigate and map a burning building, identify trapped inhabitants, and send recovery/escape routes to firefighters as fast as possible. During my background investigation of this subject, I discovered that navigating fires has traditionally posed a challenge for robotic systems. Traditional LiDAR (Light based) sensors are often employed for SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: A class of perception and mapping algorithms), but these sensors lose accuracy significantly in smoke. Meanwhile, SONAR (Soundwave-based) or RADAR (Radio-based) mapping systems are often very bulky and technically complex, making them challenging to incorporate onto a dynamic robotic system. This posed a perception challenge: to develop a novel perception and navigation system that can function effectively in a fire environment.

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. I decided I had to discover what was going on. When I got home, I scoured the internet and found some qualitative explanations, but not much more. Maybe it was because I had just taken differential geometry at school and a course on planetary-scale ocean dynamics with another educational program, or that I had worked on fluid dynamics simulations for an autonomous underwater robotics project, but I really wanted to devise a mathematical description of this phenomenon. I love understanding not just the intuition behind why things happen, but the equations as well … I present a theoretical model of gravity-driven laminar fluid chains. A stream of fluid falls under this categorization based on the distinctive shape of its mutually orthogonal sheets of fluid bounded by curved jets, which will be referred to throughout this discussion as “chain links.” If the fluid falls through specific orifice geometries under the influence of gravity, the chain will be oriented downwards. The jets that bound the sheets collide over and over again, pulled towards each other by surface tension and cascading down through the system. This paper will present both a qualitative explanation of this phenomenon and simulation of it based on a mathematical model. The figure below shows an example of one such chain link. For the purposes of this paper, the flow within the sheet and jets will both be treated as laminar. The analysis will consider the case with no motion of the fluid in directions perpendicular to the direction of flow, nor eddies, vortices, or turbulence of any other kind in the stream …

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. As the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown began, with some more time on my hands, I set a goal to explore this new realm … At the same time, I heard about new trends in robotics–autonomous machines that could disinfect facilities with little to no human involvement, robotic nurses to deliver supplies and materials to the sick, robotic emergency responders, and more. I learned about the tremendous potential of autonomous mobile robots in service applications … This was plenty enough motivation for me to get started. I borrowed one of my robotics team’s old robots and got to work in my garage, starting with YouTube tutorials and learning the basics of motion control. I didn’t quite know what I was researching yet or what my end goal was, just that I wanted to become an expert in this field and build something useful and novel; the rest I would figure out later …

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. These discrepancies are detected using threshold values. For example, if a measured relationship value is below the threshold, one can determine that the robot is not in the position it is supposed to be in. In addition to this, a message can be sent to the system manager or the robot system can be shutdown to prevent any damage to its surroundings.

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. The prevalent class of algorithms for solving these problems are largely sequential in nature, where the differential equations that describe flight motion are solved in an inner loop while an outer loop performs the optimization of the control variables. These methods can be computationally expensive as they require repeated solution of the differential equations for each guess of the control variable in addition to calculation of gradients for the optimizer … In this research, I built upon a simultaneous solution method called orthogonal collocation on finite elements to develop a robust trajectory optimization system with an effective initialization strategy …

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. Not only by number, but by cost, it clearly is a major problem in aviation. Boeing estimates a minimum yearly cost, barring any disasters like the 1.7 billion dollar Icelandic volcanic eruption, of at least 4 billion dollars a year from FOD.

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. Numerous studies have attempted to mimic the water strider’s water walking abilities by creating robotic water striders with a similar morphological design. Despite our understanding of surface tension mechanisms, water striders are still far more adept at navigating along the free surface than their robotic counterparts, and it is clear that a deeper understanding is needed to produce robots on par with actual water striders. Such a robot would be exceptionally useful in monitoring marsh environments not suited for either floating or walking robots and would be much more easily converted into an amphibious robot because it already has the entire leg structure in place. Also, water strider robots could skate effortlessly over the surface of the water because they do not have to push water out of the way like a floating robot making it very fast and efficient…..