July 1, 2020
The Autonomous Insect Robotics (AIR) Lab at the University of Washington is recruiting extremely-qualified undergraduates for summer research and beyond, for research credit or pay depending on topic. Topics include:
- Creation of an ultra-light sensor package on flex-circuit to be incorporated onto insect-sized aerial robots and small (3cm) helicopters. Entails flex circuit design and fab and embedded software development on an ARM M4 microcontroller (mechatronics/ee/embedded background required).
- Creation and incorporating a tiny, lightweight wind sensor onto a palm-sized drone. Entails finding and testing commercial wind sensors (if there are any), and/or adding strain sensors to the fins, quantifying the effect that wind has on the strain sensors, and extracting information about wind direction/speed from that data (paid).
- Creation of mechanisms for insect-sized hopping robots that are resettable and steerable, actuated by piezo, coil, or shape memory alloy (possibly paid).
- Design and feedback control of a miniaturized laser-fabricated electro-hydrodynamic thruster and high-voltage drive circuit (EE background required).
These are long term projects that can lead to capstone projects and commercial spinoffs.
Please contact PI Prof. Sawyer Fuller (minster@uw.edu) if interested or if you have questions. Please include a resume and, if possible, a portfolio of previous engineering projects. Women and underrepresented minorities are particularly encouraged to apply.