Creative Robotics Studio

The Creative Robotics Studio seeks to explore how robotic motion affects an audience’s emotional response towards the robot itself. The team will develop an experiment to empirically measure a spectrum of emotional responses from fear or disgust to comfort or congeniality and then use those findings to develop a set of motion guidelines and tools for increasing the accuracy and efficacy of Human Robot Interactions

A Heterogeneous Swarm Solution for Disaster Reconnaissance: A Feasibility Study

The disaster mitigation process is dangerous to search-and-rescue (S&R) personnel. Organizations work to develop robotic technologies for disaster response. However, disaster robotics is often characterized by large, bulky, and expensive systems. The goal of this MQP is to analyze the feasibility of a simple, cost-effective heterogeneous robot swarm to map a disaster location for on-site S&R personnel. We designed a ground robot prototype that can be dropped by a drone. We tested collaborative algorithms to perform mapping of cluttered environments by both the ground robot and the drone. Our study also involves tests on durability and disposability of the droppable robot and scalability tests of the mapping algorithms