Motion Tracking for Soft Robotic Arms
Mentors Project Description The Soft Robotics Control Lab at Boston University is developing large, pneumatic soft robot arms for interaction with humans. In order to test our autonomous control systems for these robots, we need to sense the position of the parts of the robot in 3D space. This REU project seeks to integrate our […]
Simulation of the Lung Environment for Validation of Soft Robot Bronchoscopy
Mentors Project Description Lung cancer remains as the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States due to the difficulty to treat and diagnose early-stage lung tumors. The main reason for this difficulty is that during a bronchoscopy procedure the surgeon must navigate tortuous paths to the periphery of the lung where early tumors […]
Machine Learning Optimization of OAM-Mediated Nonlinear Fiber Optics
Mentors Project Description Structured light – i.e. light with spatially-tailored intensity, phase, or polarization properties – has become a ubiquitous tool across myriad applications in optics; including biological imaging, quantum optics, telecommunications, and more. In particular, it has been shown that light beams which carry orbital angular momentum (OAM) can propagate for kilometer-scale distances in […]
Studying Thermal Properties of Direct Air Capture Adsorbents with Hot Disk Instruments
Mentors Project Description Climate change is among the most critical challenges facing humanity today. Society’s infrastructure, agriculture, and health are threatened by global warming, which leads to floods, unprecedented weather patterns, and damaging natural disasters. No amount of emissions reductions alone will be able to reduce emissions enough to stop irreparable global warming. Thus, Direct […]
User Interface for Electronic Control of a Biospired Soft Robot
Mentors Project Description The project will involve developing a graphical user interface for controlling electro-permanent magnets (EPMs)- based valves. To select the fluid lines that will activate the channel of our soft actuators, we configure electro-permanent magnets as electronically activated pinch valves. These are used to control an octopus-inspired soft robot for underwater exploration. The […]
Speckle Contrast Optical Spectroscopy for Cuffless Blood Pressure Measurements
Mentors Project Description Hypertension affects more than half of all adults in the United States, but one in five adults with hypertension remain undiagnosed. The current gold standard for non-invasive blood pressure estimation is the cuff-based sphygmomanometer, which can only provide discrete, intermittent measurements of blood pressure. Continuous, cuff-less blood pressure measurements would enable blood […]
Population Responses of Living Neural Networks to Periodic Drive
Mentors Project Description The hippocampal formation (HF) in mammals is responsible for collecting information about the sensory world and, if appropriate, storing that information as memories, to be offloaded to other brain structures later. The HF has a number of notable response properties, including nested, quasi-periodic activity. In this project, the student will work with […]
An In Vitro Model of the Infarct Border Zone
Mentors Project Description The severity of a heart attack is determined by the area of heart muscle affected by the occluded vessel, but also by a‘border zone’ (BZ) that separates the infarct region from the unaffected heart muscle. The BZ has been implicated in adverse remodeling that occurs after a heart attack, but because the […]
Hybrid Surgical Robot Project
Mentors Project Description With the advancement of rigid surgical robots, they have been increasingly used for a wide range of surgical procedures, offering improved safety and precision. However, soft surgical robots have been developed to provide a safer interaction with surgical environments. Despite this, the controllability and ability to generate forces in the desired direction […]
An Optical Phantom to Mimic Skin Affected by Scleroderma
Mentors Project Description Scleroderma, also known as Systemic Sclerosis, is a chronic autoimmune disease characterized by hardening and tightening of the skin and connective tissues. An immune response triggers inflammation causing the body to make too much collagen. This excess of collagen in the skin and other tissues causes patches of tight, hard skin. Recent […]