Robotics Institute: Research Assistant

Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab

As a member of the RASL in Fall 2020, the end goal of my project was to develop a robot that acted as a student. It would test the teaching abilities of a true student, which would provide teachers with insight into how well this student is performing in school. The basis of this is that the student only knows the material fully when it is able to teach it to someone else. The robot would purposefully make mistakes on certain topics, testing if the student teacher would be able to catch these errors and correct the robot.

The robot needed to detect the facial features and emotion of the student teacher in order to respond appropriately, and this is the side of the project I worked on. As you can see above, I worked to develop an application that takes a camera feed and detects the facial landmark features as well as perform some background computation to give insight into the mood of the face in the video stream. This was used as part of the final project.

Biorobotics Lab

As a member of the Biorobotics Lab in Fall 2019, I worked on the TRACIR force feedback project. The goal of the project was to automate injections during surgery. As a result, the robot had a force sensor attached to the needle, and I worked on scripts that detected if the needle was in fact inserted into the skin. After this, I worked on actually determining the depth that the needle was inside the skin, in order to extrapolate what skin layer the needle had penetrated.