Robotics is the study of robots interacting in the physical world through sensing, perception, planning, and interacting. However, robotics is about about so much more than just a robot. This presentation will highlight the many aspects of robotics which makes it an intriguing field for people of all ages. First of all, robotics is a wonderful tool for showing connections between science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM). Robotics affords multidisciplinary teamwork to enable students to improve professional skills like communication, collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving. Robotics is ideal for recruiting more people to STEM by getting them excited by the possibilities of what their minds and hands can create. A byproduct of bringing more people to STEM is that robotics can help to diversify the profession. It is extremely important that the STEM community reflect the diversity of the world that we live in because multidisciplinary and diverse teams create the best solutions to problems. Lack of diversity on teams can yield to products that that suffer from bias. There have been several examples of this in the news media recently. Human-robot interaction is the study of understanding, designing and evaluating how humans engage with robots. The future of robotics technology is closely tied to effective and efficient communication between humans and robots. Ideally this communication should be free of gender or racial inequity and bias. This presentation will highlight the various aspects of the field of robotics which makes it a gamechanger in STEM, diversity, equity and society.

Since 2016, Atlas has been changing the idea of what robots can do with YouTube hits such as “What’s new, Atlas?”, where it backflipped its way to 19M views, as well as showcasing its latest dance moves in “Do You Love Me?”. Tune in to this talk to get a glimpse into the mechanical design workflow and key ingredients that have enabled turning science fiction into hardware reality.

Accurate simulations of combustion and reacting fluid flows require complex, multi-step chemical kinetic models for describing the coupled chemical reactions. These models are often large and mathematically stiff, and contribute to the overall high computational expense of simulating practical phenomena relevant to energy, transportation, and aerospace applications. This talk will discuss these issues, and review work the Niemeyer Research Group has done to tackle these and related problems.

Insects walk on water, snakes slither and fish swim. Animals move with astounding grace, speed and versatility, but how do they do it and what can we learn from them? From the incredible efficiency of the wet dog shake to colonies of ants building rafts out of their own bodies, David Hu shows how animals have adapted and evolved to traverse their environments, taking advantage of physical laws with results that are startling and ingenious.

The field of indoor air quality continually grows to accommodate novel pollutant sources as they are developed. Office equipment such as laser printers and photocopiers are known to emit volatile and particulate air pollutants, especially ultrafine aerosols. With the recent development and popularization of 3D printers, studies are needed to understand their potential emissions to indoor environments. 3D printing (also referred to as additive manufacturing or rapid prototyping) is a bottom-up process of creating a three-dimensional object layer by layer. As low-cost 3D printers are continually developed, personal-use units have become more popular in everyday indoor environments such as homes, offices, and schools. As shown in by studies published in recent years, heating and extrusion of polymeric materials generates ultrafine aerosols.

This talk will focus on how a Lagrangian perspective on dynamics is used to capture the time evolution of complex systems, e.g., granular flows, fluid-solid interaction problems, etc. In this context, the aspects that turn out to be more challenging are tied to the handling of friction, contact, geometry, large deformations and numerical solution scaling. The talk will highlight modeling and numerical solution techniques developed to address several of these challenges. Our solution methodology contributions have been implemented in an open-source simulation platform called Chrono, which is available on GitHub and used by hundreds of individuals to analyze large multi-physics dynamics problems. The talk will touch on several applications tied to granular dynamics, 3D printing and additive manufacturing, robotics, and ground vehicle mobility.

Competitive rowing highly values boat position and velocity data for real-time feedback during training, racing and post-training analysis. The ubiquity of smartphones with embedded position (GPS) and motion (accelerometer) sensors motivates their possible use in these tasks. In this project, we investigate the use of two real-time digital filters to achieve highly accurate but reasonably priced measures of boat speed and distance traveled. Both filters combine acceleration and location data to estimate boat distance and speed; the first using a complementary frequency response-based filter technique, the second with a Kalman filter formalism that includes adaptive, real-time estimates of effective accelerometer bias. The estimates of distance and speed from both filters were validated and compared with accurate reference data from a 10 Hz differential GPS system with better than 1 cm precision, in experiments using two subjects (an experienced club-level rower and an elite rower) in two different boats on a 300 m course. Relative to single channel (smartphone GPS only) measures of distance and speed, the complementary filter improved the accuracy and precision of boat speed, boat distance traveled, and distance per stroke by 44%, 42%, and 73%, respectively, while the Kalman filter improved the accuracy and precision of boat speed and distance per stroke by 51% and 72%, respectively. Both filters demonstrate promise as general purpose methods to substantially improve estimates of important rowing performance metrics.