Self-Directed Summer Design Experience Across Disciplines and the Globe

During the summer of 2014, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology initiated a multidisciplinary international design experience for the benefit of the student populations of both institutions. The goal of this program was to create an international multidisciplinary team-based research and design project that included exposure to the academic and industrial environments in both Hong Kong as well as the United States (specifically the Boston area). The Harvard-HKUST International Summer Design Experience occurred completely outside of any classroom setting during nine weeks and was co-located in Boston and Hong Kong for four weeks each. The reason to hold this program in both Hong Kong and Cambridge, MA was to give the students a chance to work within and experience both campuses, culturally and geographically. The pedagogical approach was unique, as there was no embedded curriculum and students were able to freely pursue a project in a given topic area that they were interested in. The major topic for this summer was Visible Light Communication systems. In this paper we present the general pedagogical approach to this experience and provide some insights and examples of the effect the program had on students.Engineering and Applied Science

Proximity and Visuotactile Point Cloud Fusion for Contact Patches in Extreme Deformation

Equipping robots with the sense of touch is critical to emulating the capabilities of humans in real world manipulation tasks. Visuotactile sensors are a popular tactile sensing strategy due to data output compatible with computer vision algorithms and accurate, high resolution estimates of local object geometry. However, these sensors struggle to accommodate high deformations of the sensing surface during object interactions, hindering more informative contact with cm-scale objects frequently encountered in the real world. The soft interfaces of visuotactile sensors are often made of hyperelastic elastomers, which are difficult to simulate quickly and accurately when extremely deformed for tactile information. Additionally, many visuotactile sensors that rely on strict internal light conditions or pattern tracking will fail if the surface is highly deformed. In this work, we propose an algorithm that fuses proximity and visuotactile point clouds for contact patch segmentation that is entirely independent from membrane mechanics. This algorithm exploits the synchronous, high-res proximity and visuotactile modalities enabled by an extremely deformable, selectively transmissive soft membrane, which uses visible light for visuotactile sensing and infrared light for proximity depth. We present the hardware design, membrane fabrication, and evaluation of our contact patch algorithm in low (10%), medium (60%), and high (100%+) membrane strain states. We compare our algorithm against three baselines: proximity-only, tactile-only, and a membrane mechanics model. Our proposed algorithm outperforms all baselines with an average RMSE under 2.8mm of the contact patch geometry across all strain ranges. We demonstrate our contact patch algorithm in four applications: varied stiffness membranes, torque and shear-induced wrinkling, closed loop control for whole body manipulation, and pose estimation

Panoramic optical and near-infrared SETI instrument: prototype design and testing

The Pulsed All-sky Near-infrared Optical Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (PANOSETI) is an instrument program that aims to search for fast transient signals (nano-second to seconds) of artificial or astrophysical origin. The PANOSETI instrument objective is to sample the entire observable sky during all observable time at optical and near-infrared wavelengths over 300 - 1650 nm$^1$. The PANOSETI instrument is designed with a number of modular telescope units using Fresnel lenses ($\sim$0.5m) arranged on two geodesic domes in order to maximize sky coverage$^2$. We present the prototype design and tests of these modular Fresnel telescope units. This consists of the design of mechanical components such as the lens mounting and module frame. One of the most important goals of the modules is to maintain the characteristics of the Fresnel lens under a variety of operating conditions. We discuss how we account for a range of operating temperatures, humidity, and module orientations in our design in order to minimize undesirable changes to our focal length or angular resolution.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl