BUILDING A COMMUNITY: Refining the Robotics Innovation Competition and Conference

This is an investigation to identify the necessary steps that need to be taken in the development of the Robotics Innovations Competition and Conference. These steps are those that will ensure that the RICC achieves its stated goal of building a strong community in the field of robotics, featuring a lasting connection between academia and industry. Ensuring this will be accomplished by identifying and anticipating the needs of the parties involved in the RICC- university professors, members of industry, and student participants. This project aims to identify those needs through interview and survey techniques, and then design ways to meet the needs of these groups. It is believed that doing so is necessary to fostering the community that the RICC aims to build

Design of an Active-Assistance Balancing Mechanism for a Bicycle

The goal of this project is to design and build a prototype self balancing bicycle for use as a teaching tool for someone learning to ride a bicycle and as means for a disabled person to ride a bicycle who would otherwise not be able to do so. The project consists of a research phase in which similar systems have been investigated to help determine a sensible design approach and to establish appropriate design specifications; a design phase in which a prototype was designed to meet the aforementioned specifications; and a construction phase, in which the prototype was built and tested