The course features a self-directed term-long assignment created by Prof. Ian Hunter to give the students an opportunity to make measurements on something of personal interest to them, referred to as Go Forth and Measure.
Experimental techniques for observation and measurement of physical variables such as force, strain, temperature, flow rate, and acceleration. Emphasizes principles of transduction, measurement circuitry, MEMS sensors, Fourier transforms, linear and nonlinear function fitting, uncertainty analysis, probability density functions and statistics, system identification, electrical impedance analysis and transfer functions, computer-aided experimentation, and technical reporting.
I am very interested in Robotics, especially bio-inspired robotics. Before the class, I was involved in a research project investigating an underwater suction gripper for which I was creating a bio-inspired design for a suction gripper based on octopus’s suckers. For this, I begin investigating soft-robotic designs, which often use SMA’s in their designs. After seeing that much prior research in the field used a variety of different shaped SMA’s with little reasoning as to why the shape being used was being used, I decided to investigate this more. And so, my research question became how does the shape which an SMA is annealed to affect the time-dependent force response by which it pulls.
The following is the full paper of the results of my experiment!