Student News Microrobotics Team Wins Big


In May, three MechE doctoral students—Eric Diller, Steven Floyd, and Chytra Pawashe—trav- eled to Anchorage, Alaska, to participate in the 2010 NIST Mobile Microrobotics Challenge, sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Tech-


nology. The event was held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The Carnegie Mellon group was one of seven university and collegiate student teams invited to participate after submitting proposals in late 2009. All robots entered in the competition were required to be smaller than 600 micrometers in their largest dimension and had to operate without the direct connection of wires.


Making a Splash I


n June, an interdisciplinary team of Carnegie Mellon engineering students traveled to the 2010 Solar Splash event, an annual collegiate engineering competition sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The 16- member team—which included students from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, as well as Electrical and Computer Engineering—had spent the previous year preparing a new boat design to debut at this year’s competi- tion, held in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Over the course of four days, the


Carnegie Mellon undergraduates com- peted against 11 other collegiate teams in a variety of events which tested the speed, endurance, and quality of their boat design. The Carnegie Mellon team won the Outstanding System Design Award and placed second in Outstanding Technical Report.


This annual event, created by ASME to promote energy conservation while giving students hands-on experience,


8 CARNEGIE MECH


marked the culmination of months of hard work for the Carnegie Mellon team. Throughout the year, the team has weekly work meetings that focus on design, engineering, and construction issues, as well as weekly executive meetings where members dis- cuss fundraising and other administrative matters.


The team is advised by Professor Susan Finger of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who emphasizes that the students take respon- sibility for everything related to the Solar Splash project. “Carnegie Mellon students have a certain quality about them—they’re very self-motivated,” says Finger. “As faculty advisor, I give them the freedom to explore and work through challenges on their own. They come to me only when they run into a problem they can’t solve.”


MechE students on this year’s Solar Splash team included Michael Barako, Jon Boerner, Ibuki Kamei, Paul Kimball, Joseph Meyer, Matt Stanton, and Jennifer Tang.•


The competition consisted of three events designed to test each microrobot’s speed, agility, maneuverability, response to computer control, and ability to manipulate small objects. NIST determined these necessary skills based on the capabilities that future microbots will need for tasks such as microsurgery or the manufacture of microscopic electronic devices. The Carnegie Mellon team, named “Magic and


Voodoo,” took second place in each event with its magnetically controlled robots called Mag-µBots. Team members, under the direction of Associate


Professor Metin Sitti, have been working on micro- meter-scale robots for several years. They will continue to explore the uses of their microrobots robots for bio- technology, micro-manufacturing and manipulation, and biomedical applications.•


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