Representative projects completed at Tufts University

• Facial Tracking Ball Launcher: Used OpenCV with a Raspberry Pi and a camera to track faces in the vicinity. A servo motor on the laser cut stand uses those coordinates in space to angle the launcher towards the face. Then utilized an IR remote and receiver controlled by the Arduino to send a signal to the Raspberry Pi to fire the ball. When the button was pressed on remote; the two motors would begin to run, a gate was lifted releasing a ball, and a ball was subsequently launched at the targeted person.

• Robotic Writing Arm: A robotic arm consisting of laser cut arm linkages, a laser cut base, 3D printed arm supports and are moved by servo motors. At the end of the arm is a custom 3D printed end effector that can hold a marker. The arm is controlled by a Raspberry Pi 4 connected to a RPi touchscreen. The touchscreen was programmed to run a python code that tracked the coordinates of the touches which allowed the arm to mimic that same movement with the end effector. The arm stored the movement in its memory and on command would perfectly repeat it.

• Self-Balancing Vehicle: A 3D printed/laser cut segway-like design that uses a Raspberry Pi 4 coupled with various sensors (IMU, LIDAR) to balance itself as it tries to fall over. Servo motors are attached to the two wheels so that as it falls, the IMU detects the angle, and the wheels are adjusted to balance it. We needed to use live PID tuning in order to get quick results, so ROS was used to run it.

• HRI Serving Robot: A 3D printed base attached to a laser cut body and a head on top that overall resembles a “bear”. The body could rotate 180 degrees via a servo motor in the base. It also has a 3D printed arm with a microservo motor and gears that allows it to open and close its “hand”. This robot is designed as a drink server that can track a face using OpenCV, detect emotion or
  moods based off of facial expressions, and then
  decides if it is a good time to serve its customer the drink. An LCD in the head gives it a face and has a speaker so the bear can talk to its customers.

• Balance Assist/Correction Robot: Designed for those with balance issues, this project entails a backpack-like design with a closed “hallway” on top. In the hallway is a robot that is comprised of a stepper motor with laser cut wheels attached to 3D printed gears. The robot is operated using an Arduino. The hallway has an IMU attached in the middle so that it can tell if the person is leaning one way or another. If the person is leaning to the left too much, the stepper motor will begin to run and the robot will move in the opposite direction (the right in this case) to help the person balance or at least notify them their balance is shifting.

• Brachiation Robot: A biomimicry robot was built that can navigate monkey bars. Using inspiration from monkeys, spiders, and sloths, the robot has 4 arms with 2 linkages in each. The outer arms are shorter than the inner arms so that it may navigate different sized gaps in the monkey bars. Each linkage has a microservo attached to it so each arm can move individually. At the end of each arm is a hook (claw) that has a servo attached to it as well so it can move. The arms attach to a laser cut base with larger servos on it to control the overall angle of each arm. The base also houses the Raspberry Pi Zero that controls the arms. A state model was made to determine the ability of all arms and the path each one can take to optimize performance. This robot can either be controlled via remote or it has a camera and a LIDAR on its base so it can be run automatically.

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Projects completed at Susquehanna University

• Piezoelectric Powered Shoes: For my Capstone at Susquehanna, I created shoes that utilized piezoelectric disks to power a capacitor. The disks were embedded in the shoes to optimize the weight distribution on them so each step a person took, the maximum weight was activating them. When pressed, the piezodisks create a wave of voltage that was then wired to multiple bridge rectifiers in order to make all the voltage flow the same way and make it positive. The bridge rectifiers then were connected to a capacitor that would store this electricity which could be released to charge a phone or power something externally. For the experiments, the capacitor was attached to a voltmeter to show how rapidly the capacitor would be charged with each step. Different size capacitors charge at different rates and would require more or less steps to accumulate a desired voltage.

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