On Sept. 28, the Northeast Robotic Colloquium (NERC) hosted their 2024 event at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Student Union.
According to the UMass robotics website, the event brought together 225 people working in robotics research at various universities across New England and Canada.
The event was divided into three keynote talks, three abstract talks sessions and two poster sessions featuring around 50 posters each and ten demos in total. Throughout the poster session participants walked around and talked to each other about their posters and research.
Rishiraj Bose, PhD mechanical and industrial engineering student at UMass, presented a poster on his research in adaptive underwater robotics to assist human gait.
“How do I use this device that I have in a way that is actually helpful?” asked Bose.
Bose often works with UMass athletics to test his projects. His most recent prototype is a “wing” that can be attached to a person’s leg when using an underwater treadmill environment.
Bose said the technology has the capability to “customize what a person feels when they’re using that system because different people might want different things depending on what their objective is.” The wing can adjust location to move based on the force is being applied to it, by pushing down or back for example.
One of the demonstrations featured a “medical supply library” built by the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation at UMass. A constructed medal with a box like frame, medical supplies are placed into the box to be scanned and turned into a digital replica.
Another demonstration given by Evolutionary Robotics Lab with Union College, showed a silicone made syringe pump that can work with soft robots, commonly used to mimic organic life and perform delicate tasks.
Soft robots are unable to pull the vacuum with commercially available syringes. The new soft vacuum can be flexible and adaptable to a soft robot environment.
Donghyun Kim, assistant professor at UMass, gave a keynote talk on “Advancing Legged Robots: Human Study to Innovation.” The talk highlighted his groups’ research on changing the trajectory of a robotic leg to make it play soccer and their creation of service dogs that are robots.
According to Kim, a high torque is needed to make a robot walk. They use a basic physics equation, mass times acceleration equals force, to know that they needed to reduce the weight of the leg and make it thinner in order to make the robot walk.
Starting with a single robot leg, they tested the identical processes with changing the torque and velocity that it moves with. Using a human-animated trajectory communication, they can calculate how the leg moves in motion.
Kim’s group is working on making robotic dogs talk so that the technology can help lead the blind. They found that the dog needs to be one step behind the person and need to push them, not pull them. The dog that has been developed and found to be best in training focusing avoiding obstacles rather than navigating them.
“As I mentioned, we just figured out what we had to develop. We still need some time to develop the technology.” said Kim.
Manoj Velmurugan, PhD student in robots at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, gave an abstract talk on aerial robots.
The drones are training to fly in an empty room, but drones ‘think’ they are navigating through a real environment. They first take a video of the course and put it into a motion software that calculates the x and y coordinates of the locations.
Velmurugan compared this effect as being the same to walking around a room with virtual reality (VR) goggles on.
“Our framework will be important in future research for enabling navigation in adverse conditions, testing different optics, and generation of embodied alien data sets,” Velmurugan said.
Using optical flow in a deep learning model, the drone is able to identify and move through unknown gaps. They use the limits of the system that operates over 100 HZ to have fast avoidance of obstacles moving at a speed of more than five meters per second.
The NERC for 2025 will next be hosted by Cornell University on Oct. 11, 2025.
Mia Blue can be reached at [email protected]