Team MIT takes on the DARPA Robotics Challenge, continued
Engineering Design Studio brings ‘mind and hand’ to EECS by Lauren J. Clark
forts of the large group of graduate students working on the planning and control aspects of the system. He notes, “That part is easy, because the students are all extremely talented and self-motivated.” Overall, Teller notes that the DRC has motivated Team MIT to incorporate their research advances into the DARPA tasks to achieve real-world utility. He is pleased that he and his students, whose previous focus had not been on human-like motion, are engaging in an intensive collaboration: “It’s wonderful to work with and learn from Russ and his group.”
MIT, has taken the lead on using the data to semi-automatically fit object models, transmit the data and convert it to height maps used to help the robot place its feet. Atlas interprets its surroundings through its perception system, but it truly engages the world as it is operated under a planning and control system that can be applied from the lowest levels – commanding each of the 28 joints – to the more basic but wider control of the upper body. Scott Kuindersma, postdoctoral associate working with Prof. Tedrake, is the planning and control lead for the MIT DRC team. “Once the human operator has interpreted the robot’s surroundings from available sensor data,” Kuindersma, says, “the planning software works with the operations goal – such as walking to a door, for example. From there the controller, which runs on the robot, is responsible for actually carrying out the motions produced by the planner.” If it sounds like he is overworked, part of Kuindersma’s job is to organize the ef-
Equally impressed with the power of collaboration, Russ Tedrake notes about the DRC experience: “It’s a big commitment; the people who really contribute are giving their lives for this. It’s a big deal.” The dedication of the MIT team is highlighted by the fact that it was competing with teams from NASA and Lockheed Martin – while many of MIT’s members were taking final exams! Teller and Tedrake agree that the DRC has been a fantastic driver for robotics research. Tedrake says: “We are getting a really good litmus test of what we can and can’t do in order to compare ourselves with the rest of the world. It’s good for [upcoming] research and it’s good for communicating our research to others.” In the meantime, students from both of their labs end up working for or starting robotics companies that are in the news. As robotics plays a bigger role in manufacturing, medicine and as yet only fantasized roles in society, Teller and Tedrake hope that the strides the MIT DRC players have made will lead to large scale alliances to sustain longer-term collaborations. Teller says, “The capabilities that we and other DRC teams are developing are bringing us closer to the day when these machines will do useful work in our public spaces, our workplaces, and our homes.”
Visit: http://drc.mit.edu/ Meet the team: http://drc.mit.edu/team.php
Students build their own electronics with help from Cypress Semiconductor and Agilent Technologies Electrical engineering and computer science students at MIT are accustomed to designing the circuitry or control algorithms for, say, a robot. But they have largely been left out of building the robot itself. Now, a teaching laboratory called the Engineering Design Studio enables them to fabricate entire electronics-based systems. “I had never soldered before I came [to MIT], I had never used a drill,” says Lizi George ’12 MEng’14, who worked as a teaching assistant in the new fabrication facility. “The majority of EECS students don’t have that experience. But that’s one of the goals of MIT—the ‘mind and hand’ motto, getting the hands-on experience.” George had a revelation when, as an undergraduate, she took machining and power electronics classes with Steven Leeb ’87, a professor of EECS, and member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. “I was totally struck—I had never built anything before,” she says. Leeb lent his own laboratory space to undergraduates. But the equipment wasn’t up to date, and ongoing research projects took precedence over class assignments. He decided that MIT needed an advanced prototyping facility dedicated to EECS. “If you think about MIT after World War II or during the sixties and seventies, that’s when the students who were coming to us fixed cars or were ham radio operators,” says Leeb, who earned his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in EECS at MIT. “The nature of how to connect engineering science with practical applications has changed. [With EDS], we want to convey some of the excitement of modern manufacturing.” With laser cutting tools, a soldering station and other fabrication equipment, Leeb says, “students can easily create all the mechanical assembly required for an iPod dock and two speakers. They learn first-hand how two resistors are going to lower a voltage. It’s not just an abstract problem.”
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www.eecs.mit.edu
Prof. Steve Leeb, third from left, instructs students on the basics of soldering circuit boards in 6.115, Microcomputer Project Laboratory in the new Engineering Design Studio.
Brian Sennett ’13, an EECS graduate student and teaching assistant in EDS, says he knew in high school that he wanted to be an engineer. “When I came to MIT I was undecided between EECS and mechanical engineering,” he says. “I liked computers, so I gravitated to computer science. But I realized I’d rather do more hands-on building.” EDS enables students like him to experience “how electrical things work with mechanical things,” Sennett says. For his thesis, he is building a sensor system that will be able to detect whether and how many people are in a room based on their electrical properties. The students in EDS are making use of a game-changing technology called PSoC, or programmable system on a chip. Provided by Cypress Semiconductor, which sponsored the creation of EDS in Building 38, the chips combine the capability to receive analog input—from human touch or a temperature sensor, for example—and process that input digitally for the desired application. Previously, these different capabilities required separate components, such as amplifiers, an analog-digital converter, and a computer. PSoC, says Leeb, “is like having a whole parts store on a chip. You can program it to be what you want.” Currently, these chips are in use in everything from smart phones to automobile control consoles to computer-network servers. Cypress CEO T. J. Rodgers, who created the Cypress University Alliance in 2006 as a way to engage with engineering students and educators, says that his company’s alignment with MIT is strong. “MIT students grasp what our design tools do for them, and we’re trying to enable them to be the great engineers that we know they’re going to be,” Rodgers says. “We believe in getting the best minds and enabling them to develop the really cool things of the future. It’s a fun and exciting process.”
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2014
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