Internship

18 months ago, I started working as an ENGAGES scholar in the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory for Intelligent Decision and Autonomous Robots (LIDAR) Lab at Georgia Tech. Through this internship I worked 15 hours per week in Dr. Zhao's lab, traveling on public transit almost daily. At the start of my internship, with guidance from my mentor, I pursued a project entitled "A dexterous gripper for precise and delicate tasks." Grippers are robotic hands that allow a robot to grasp objects and move them from one place to another.

As robots become more prevalent in the world robots have become far more common, and so have grippers. This has led to numerous advances in gripper technology and its capabilities and is the reason for this project. Many modern-day grippers lack accuracy and adaptability due to their uniform shapes and mechanisms. Because of this like many other robots, they struggle to adapt to new situations or obstacles that might arise. The goal of this project is to design a gripper that can adapt to objects of any size and shape. By being more adaptable this new gripper will be readier for the unpredictable trials of the real world.

Digital 3D model

This is the 3D model of my gripper that I designed in solidworks. There are four main fingers set atop the base, each containing three motors. Utilizing these fingers, the gripper has been created with two unique functions:

First is the expanding finger system which is a design that will allow the gripper to adjust to objects of different sizes.

Second would be the rotating palm design which is A system that allows a pair of finger to rotate to different angles on the palm.

Assembled model

The next step was to 3D print all the pieces and assemble them in the real world to insure that they fit together correctly. As well as testing the electronic components such as the motors and Arduino

ERN Conference

The ERN Conference was a meeting of engineers, where colleges and students presented to attendees. At the conference I attended numerous speeches about various subjects. The first speech was about networking, where they encouraged us to talk with the other people at the conference. The rest of the conference was spent in poster sessions and college fairs enlighten us about our possible future opportunities.

Science Fair

This year I got the chance to compete in the Georgia Science Fair. The first day of the competition was the main day of judging. There were two sections of judging, each around 3 hours long to give the judges plenty of time to get to all participants.

The second day was when the projects were opened to the public and each participant presented their work to family and friends. This was followed by the final event, the awards ceremony, where certain students were recognized for their work.

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