USC Viterbi open house showcases student projects

Nearly 2,200 students, teachers and parents from across 28 schools attended the USC Viterbi Robotics Open House, an annual event sponsored by the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. Robotics researchers from the Viterbi School of Engineering made a comprehensive exhibition of all the research activities that are in progress at Viterbi.

The principle organizers of the event were Maja Mataric, vice dean of research, and Katie Mills, outreach administrator for Viterbi.

The event is part of the ongoing outreach efforts of Viterbi Adopt-a-School, Adopt-a-Teacher program, which aims to motivate the next generation of engineers with the creativity and possibilities of science, technology, engineering, math and machines.

“USC has a relationship with a number of schools that are part of what is called as the ‘USC Family of Schools,’” said Michelle Flowers Taylor, director of the Institute of Engineering Community and Cultural Competence. “We have this ongoing relationship with schools in the area, and we engage the students and their teachers in various on-campus activities in our schools to help really provide an exposure to the students to engineering and computer science.”

Graduate and postdoctoral students talked about what robotics is and how they first became interested in engineering, in addition to showing them application specific robots that they have developed. One example is Scribbler, a bot designed and programmed by Colin Quinsey, a biomedical engineer, that autonomously finds its way through a maze drawn in black ink on paper. Quinsey, talked about assembling sensors and actuators in a sized chassis which act as the eyes, ears and limbs of the robot.

“A lot of our projects are open ended,” Quinsey said. “We don’t have instruction based projects, rather this is a task that you have to do and you have to solve it in whatever manner you can”.

The USC VexU Robotics team, a multidisciplinary mechatronics design team and a finalist in the 2016 Vex World Competition for the design, fabrication and programming of its custom built robots, also put up a display.

Students were also shown the possibilities of controlling robots through brainwaves. Ali Marjaninejad, a doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering and Chris Lynn, a postdoctoral  student in brain body dynamics, talked about their “Modellers” research which has been ongoing in collaboration with the Caltech David Andersen Lab. The research goes a long way to help patients with disabilities mimic the abilities of a normal person with mechanical prosthetic. Marjaninejad and Lynn explained how electrodes arranged on the brain surface of a subject carried signals to the robot controller which acted to the accord of the user.

“I’m studying the physiology of movement and muscle control, particularly manual dexterity,” Lynn said. “We are doing this to learn not only how dexterity is possible, but also using small hand manipulation tasks in order to quantify and characterize disease states.”

Zhi Su, a biomedical engineer, put up a display of robotic arm which could drive a screw into a machine.

“The way my project works is actually very intuitive,” Su said. “Robots have a memory of their previous experience with one form of objects and then use the experience to do other forms of different objects.”