Engineering

Below-the-elbow prosthetics are expensive and offer limited reliability. Most use surface electromyography for prosthetic control due to its non-invasive nature. However, current systems require up to eight sensors, increasing cost and power consumption. Alternatively, this underactuated prosthetic design uses six sEMG placed on major muscle groups, mitigating signal degradation arising from variations in body size, movement, perspiration, etc. A bandpass ... Read More

The Duckietown Project was created by the MIT graduate class in 2016, and has transformed into a worldwide program. The Duckietown platform uses a robot consisting of cameras, actuators, and April Tags to navigate a modular cityscape. This research focuses on developing autonomous robots that integrate internal and external sensors with image processing to interpret their surroundings. The research aims ... Read More

Modern robotics increasingly draws inspiration from organisms that efficiently navigate complex natural environments. The Atlantic mole crab (Emerita talpoida) is an exemplary model due to its ability to rapidly burrow into shifting sandy substrates along coastal beaches. This capability comes from its specialized appendage structure and coordinated movement patterns, enabling the mole crab to overcome resistive forces within granular media. ... Read More

Automated aquarium monitors are expensive. Hobbyists may test manually on occasion, while researchers choose between high costs or reduced accuracy. In addition, potential tank contamination with substances such as Hg or KCl is a concern. As an alternative, our design uses a hands-free brief submersion of water for external analysis. A 3D-printed structure was attached to a stepper motor. The ... Read More

Surgical procedures often involve strategic incision, suturing, and deformation of tissue, resulting in deliberate geometric manipulation of material. Such manipulations impose local deficits or excesses of material, in the form of conical singularities or disclinations, leading to geometric material responses (eg. emergence of ridges, conical regions, and stress localization). As fundamental components of surgical procedures on flat tissue (e.g., Z-plasty) ... Read More

Hybrid energy systems integrating compressed air energy storage (CAES) have garnered growing interest for their mechanical simplicity, rapid discharge capability, and compatibility with both electrical and mechanical subsystems. However, the efficiency of such systems is highly sensitive to design choices including pressure regulation, valve timing, and control strategies, factors that can result in significant energy losses if poorly optimized. This ... Read More

In robotic surgery, precision continues to be one of the primary challenges due to external mechanical variables such as viscous friction, Coulomb friction, inertia, and backlash deadbands. Current mathematical models of prosthetic systems do not consider these variables. The aim of this study is to achieve one-to-one correspondence between analytical, simulated and real-world hardware implementation, and to achieve precision in ... Read More

This project explores cost-efficiency in prosthetic design through the methods of 3D printing. Traditional prosthetics can cost up to thousands of dollars and often have limited accessibility. In many cases, insurance coverage for these devices are limited, creating significant financial barriers for individuals who require them. The purpose of this study is to analyze the process of designing and producing ... Read More

Anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are a major driver of climate change, motivating the need for more effective carbon capture and storage methods. This study investigates the potential of using gas centrifuge systems for CO2 separation and enrichment (Oh & Lee 2022). Using computer simulations, we model the outputs of CO2 within rotating centrifuge chambers and examine how changes in ... Read More

Induced drag, generated by wingtip vortices, accounts for approximately 40% of total drag on commercial aircraft during cruise conditions, representing a significant target for aerodynamic optimization. This study investigates how different winglet geometries affect wingtip vortex formation and induced drag in fixed-wing aircraft. Using CAD software, a baseline wing and three winglet configurations (classic vertical, blended, and split-scimitar) were modeled ... Read More

Lighter-than-air airships were once a promising mode of transportation but declined in use due to early material limitations, safety failures, and competition from heavier-than-air aircraft. Despite this historical setback, advancements in material science, photovoltaics, and hydrogen risk modeling warrant a renewed investigation into the feasibility of airships as a method of shipping. This study evaluates the technical and environmental viability ... Read More

Predictive maintenance is critical for the efficiency and performance of industrial operations, and while conventional predictive maintenance is often expensive and dependent on cloud infrastructure, the project seeks to design and implement a low-cost fault detection system for rotating machinery using TinyML. The proposed system utilizes a resource-constrained microcontroller (Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense) to perform real-time monitoring of the ... Read More

Traditional aerodynamic optimization has relied heavily on the use of computationally expensive methods, requiring hundreds to thousands of Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations and data to produce optimal designs, often taking days to weeks to complete. This study presents a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to optimize this process by generating candidate airfoils that are compared with real airfoil data (gathered from ... Read More

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing public health challenge in which bacteria evolve the ability to survive antibiotic treatment. As antibiotics become less effective, new strategies are needed to fight bacterial infections. One promising approach is the use of antimicrobial nanoparticles - extremely small materials (< 100 nm) that can interact with bacteria in multiple ways and disrupt important cellular processes. ... Read More

This project investigates how machine learning and computer vision can be used to recognize human hand gestures and translate them into control signals for a prosthetic or robotic hand. Using a webcam and computer vision tools such as MediaPipe, a program was developed to track hand landmarks and collect gesture data in real time. These landmark positions are used to ... Read More

Pressure ulcers are injuries to skin and underlying tissue caused by high pressures that impede blood flow, particularly near bony areas. Interface pressures exceeding 32 mmHg for extended periods significantly increase the risk of tissue damage in supine patients on traditional hospital mattresses. This work explores the potential application of hydrogel-based multilayer mattress overlay to prevent pressure ulcers by actively ... Read More

This project focuses on the implementation of machine learning-based voice recognition on a resource limited microcontroller platform. The primary goal is to design and integrate a system capable of identifying five distinct languages - English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Mandarin - using real-time spoken input. The system captures user speech through a voice recognition sensor, converts the audio into text, ... Read More

Radiative cooling textiles are an emerging technology that creates subambient temperatures under clothing. Through minimizing solar absorption in the solar spectrum (0.2–2.5 μm) while maximizing thermal emission within the atmospheric transparency window (ATW, 8–13 μm), the fabrics reduce overheating risks and cooling costs from energy-intensive systems such as air conditioning. However, the common electrospinning method of fabrication has high time ... Read More

Ice accretion on surfaces poses persistent safety and performance challenges for transportation systems and infrastructure in cold environments. While extensive research has focused on developing ice-phobic materials, most laboratory studies investigate ice formed from pure water, even though natural ice typically contains dissolved impurities such as salts, acids, bases, organic compounds, and mineral particles. These solutes may accumulate during freezing ... Read More

Thermionic energy conversion (TEC) is a means of recycling waste heat into usable, clean energy without the need for moving parts or harmful byproducts. The incorporation of micro/nanoscale physics promises to significantly boost the efficiency and power throughput of TEC, making it competitive with modern clean energy systems, such as solar panels. While there is a vast depth of research ... Read More