The first Robotics Alumni Award winner

September 28, 2022

The Robotics Department announced its first Alumni Merit Award recipient last week: Meghan Dailey.

Dailey joined the inaugural Robotics graduate class in 2014, taking a risk at the time with the new Robotics graduate program. The Robotics Department invited Dailey, now a machine learning specialist in Advanced Research Computing under ITS at U-M, back on homecoming to present the alumni award and learn about her latest work.

Continue reading ⇒

First graduate recipients of the Ehrenberg Fellowship

September 27, 2022
Two hands work on small robot on a bench top.
A student works on a robot in ROB 550, one of the first classes Robotics graduate students take with hands-on labs in hardware and coding.

Eight incoming Robotics master’s students received a scholarship award as recipients of the Roger Ehrenberg and Carin Levine Ehrenberg Fellowship. The funds, which create opportunities for a wide range of students, enable the recipients to pursue robotics degrees with greater financial stability, and help ease making the decision to further invest in their education at the University of Michigan.

Continue reading ⇒

The 2022 Robotics Outreach Ambassadors

August 26, 2022
Hardik Parwana gives drone flight lessons to a visiting Marygrove High School student.

Enthusiastic outreach is one of Michigan Robotics’ three values: as a growing field with the ability to change everyday life, we have to take on opportunities to explain what goes into robotics, what is possible or unlikely, and hopefully inspire more people to become roboticists and provide their input and experience so that robotics can serve all communities. Even if outreach is not robotics specific, being an active community member in other ways can help inform us about others’ needs.

Students are the largest part of our robotics community, and regularly take this task on in addition to their coursework, research, student instruction workloads. While there are many, many students who take part in volunteering, there are several that have gone above and beyond in the past year. These students have earned the distinction of Robotics Outreach Ambassador.

Continue reading ⇒

How we can better link mind and machine

July 28, 2022
A user's legs walking with a powered ankle exoskeleton on a treadmill
A user demonstrates walking with a lower-body exoskeleton. In a new study, powered exoskeleton users had trouble incorporating instructional haptic feedback cues, informing how future human-machine interaction must be designed. Photo: Brenda Ahearn/University of Michigan, College of Engineering, Communications and Marketing

A team led by University of Michigan researchers recently tested how exoskeleton users responded to the task of matching haptic feedback to the timing of each footstep. The team found that the haptic cues added mental workload, causing less effective use of the exoskeleton, and demonstrated the hurdles in future human-machine design.

“When we introduce haptic feedback while walking with an exoskeleton, we usually intend for the user to understand and maintain coordination with the exoskeleton,” said Man I (Maggie) Wu, a robotics PhD student.

“We discovered that the exoskeleton actually introduces a competing mental load. We really need to understand how this affects the user while they attempt to complete tasks.”

Continue reading ⇒

2022 NSF GRFP recipients of Michigan Robotics

April 18, 2022
Karen Sussex, an upper-limb amputee from Jackson, Mich., operates a Touch Bionics I-LIMB prosthetic hand as Alex Vaskov, robotics Ph.D. candidate, looks on during a testing session at a lab in the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, MI on June 13, 2019, for an advanced prosthetics study at U-M.
The Cortical Neural Prosthetics Lab conducts research on utilizing signals from arm nerves to enable real-time, intuitive, finger-level control of a robotic hand, supported in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Congratulations to the graduate students who have been awarded prestigious National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowships. The program, which helps ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce, recognizes graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing masters and doctoral degrees.

Continue reading ⇒