Artificial 3D vision is computationally intensive. It takes an impractically long time for a robot to analyze a video frame in order to accurately estimate the locations of nearby obstacles. This project will develop new techniques for selecting only the most important regions of each video frame to analyze at each moment, so that a robot can update its knowledge of obstacle locations a number of times per second. CrossWing Inc. is developing a telepresence robot that needs this capability in order to support rapid semi-autonomous navigation.

In this project, a modified Delta parallel robot is designed in which the number of passive joints is reduced, and an active joint is added to the hardware. To the best of our knowledge, this configuration seems to be the first of its kind.

In this project, kinematic and dynamic analyses will be performed. Active compliance control and collision anticipation algorithms will also be developed for this new design. This configuration will be used as the “waist” of an omni-directional, self-balancing service robot. Methodology and novelty of approach and/or application

Vitamin D compounds are being developed for the treatment of chronic kidney disease. The purpose of this proposal is to develop a cell-based screening platform that will allow the rapid assessment ofrelative efficacy of a library of compounds. The intern will use recombinant DNA methodology to generate a cell-based assay in which the green fluorescence protein will be inserted into a vitamin D responsive gene; thus, permitting the visualization of vitamin D signaling in real-time.