Biologically Inspired Robotics

Animals and insects have evolved distinct morphological, biomechanical, and sensorimotor structures that enable them to navigate reliably in a wide variety of unstructured terrains. Robots with a high range of adaption can be created by copying some of these critical elements into their designs. Students will learn concepts such as forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, dynamics, and popular robot configurations while using biological inspiration to engineer quadrupedal robots over the course of the semester.

      

Assistive Robotics

This course covers fundamentals of assistive robotics including: (1) rehabilitatiion robotics to recover motor function from stroke, (2) robotics for visually impaired, (3) prosthetics, and (4) social robotics for cognitive impairment. For each topic area, the course provides a discussion of the disability, its consequences, and robotics solutions that are being developed to address these disabilities. The topics covered in each application area include mechanical design, control, and user interface behind representative robots in the respective area. The course also introduces (1) special sensors and actuators and (2) brain-computer interfaces used in assistive robotics. The course presents general guidelines for designing assistive robots. The course also includes ethical and regulatory considerations in the design of assistive robots.

Computational Methods

The goal of the course is to introduce the student to the science and practice of mathematical modeling and analysis in Mechanical Engineering.The emphasis is on the development of the concepts involved in modeling, idealizations, approximations, error analysis and the interpretation of results. Relationships between continuous and discrete systems are discussed. Topics on consistency, convergence, uniqueness of solution are discussed.