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MEAM Seminar: “Mobile Wireless Infrastructure on Demand in Robot Teams”

Towne 313 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

The promise of multi-robot systems is that they can complete tasks quicker and more efficiently than a single robot. However, such performance gains are only realized if robots can communicate with each other and coordinate their actions. As on-board autonomy advances, robots are increasingly being deployed in environments without existing wireless infrastructure and must rely […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Enhancing Strength and Toughness Via Reinforcement with Nanocellulose Fibers”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) are a nanomaterial obtained from plant sources and have excellent mechanical properties, high aspect ratios, and are biodegradable. As a reinforcing phase, CNFs have the potential to improve the mechanical properties of polymer materials. The overarching objective of this thesis is to investigate the use of CNFs to enhance the strength and […]

MEAM Seminar: “Mixing with Activity: Transport of Swimming Microorganisms in Complex Flows”

Towne 313 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

How will swimming microorganisms affect the mixing of a diffusive contaminant in chaotic flows? Answers to this question can lead to improved understanding of the spread of pollutants (e.g. algal blooms) in oceans and lakes, as well as potentially useful applications in biofuel and vaccine productions. In this talk, I present recent experiments on the […]

MEAM Seminar: “Sedimentation of Active Suspensions: Hindrance and Phase-separation”

Towne 313 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Sedimentation of active matter is found in many natural and industrial processes. It plays an important role on the distribution of plankton in oceans, which is key part of the carbon cycle (i.e. ocean's biological pump) that transports carbon from the ocean's surface to depth. In this seminar, I will present an investigation on the […]

MEAM Seminar: “Modboats: Building an Aquatic Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robotic System out of Underactuated Modules”

Towne 313 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Modular robots offer the promise of flexibility; we will be able to deploy teams of generalist modules and reconfigure them into various specialists to perform whatever task is necessary. Surface swimming aquatic modular robots in particular are not well studied, however, because the literature assumes that the modules need to be holonomic, which makes them […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “The Design of a Community-Informed Socially Interactive Humanoid Robot and End-effectors for Novel Edge-Rolling”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

This dissertation discusses my work in building an HRI platform called Quori and my once separate now integrated work on a manipulation method that can enable robots like Quori, or any more capable robot, to move large circular cylindrical objects. Quori is a novel, affordable, socially interactive humanoid robot platform for facilitating noncontact human-robot interaction […]

MEAM Seminar: “Motion Planning for a Variable Topology Truss Robot”

Towne 313 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Variable Topology Trusses (VTTs) are a new type of modular, self-reconfigurable robot (MSRR). Like other self-reconfigurable robot systems, a VTT can change its shape to adapt to a variety of tasks, offering a wider range of capabilities than a single robot configuration. While most MSRRs consist of robot modules that are connected in a chain […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Imperfect Adhesion Between Elastic Solids”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Surface force-mediated adhesion, i.e. via van der Waals forces, is critical for the direct bonding of bulk solids in the absence of an adhesive layer. However, no two surfaces are perfectly flat nor conformal and some have intentional patterns, which leads to imperfect adhesion, i.e. interface adhesion strength that is below its ideal strength. In […]

MEAM Seminar: “Neural Network Assisted Open Boundaries for Molecular Dynamics Simulations”

Towne 313 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Molecular dynamics simulations allow for the visualization and analysis of atoms and molecules. The choice of boundary conditions in these simulations can impact the overall system, and is an important design decision. In particular, open boundary molecular dynamics simulations is one type of methodology that allows for the treatment of atomistic models with non equilibrium […]