2018: The Vine Robot
[Cover Image by Taylor Kubota] [Video by Stanford University]
1. Designed and built an open hardware website for the vine robot, a vine-like growing soft robot. This involved redesigning the portions of the robot for ease of construction, decreased material cost, and modularity in order to make the technology more accessible to others.
2. Redesigned and built a motorized pre-formed vine robot for competing at RoboSoft 2018 (IEEE RAS). In preparation for this, I built a 9 meter long replica of RoboSoft’s obstacle course for their soft robotics competition.
2016: TurtleBot and Haptic Leash (Not Pictured)
Created a python script that uses OpenCV and communicates with ROS to track specific colors from the Kinect’s live camera feed and determine the object’s center.
2015: Stroke Patient Rehabilitation Exoskeleton
The objective of our project was to design, build, and program a 2-degree-of-freedom, planar exoskeleton arm. In order to improve our understanding of and model human motor control, the exoskeleton collects precise movement data during simple movement tasks. This will allow the design of improved rehabilitative devices for stroke patients who suffer from motor deficits.
This project is part of my Independent Study with John Edmark. I am showing the results of Fall 2018 and Winter 2019. The third and fourth iterations coming soon at the end of Spring 2019.
The purpose of this piece was to bring to life something that created the illusion of a piece unlikely to work and to provide ultimately an interesting experience for whoever spins the crank. At Meet the Makers Fall 2018, users would come up and initially assume that the octahedron's extensions/fingers/leaves would come into contact with each other. However, the extending fingers never do. They simply pass each other closely. All contact is done by the geared octahedron, the engine of the project.
You can find work by John Edmark here: http://www.johnedmark.com
A blown fuse. A dark room.
The fuse closely followed by a lamp with a mind of its own.
A room unreliably lighted.
The room in which my brother and I played in growing up had been dark ever since we left for university. The only light present came from the sun during the day. At night, a decrepit lamp we found in a garage sale gave momentary bursts of light; it was temperamental in old age. The original fuse had been blown shortly before I left and, for some reason, was never replaced. That's when the lamp came in. It was supposed to be a temporary solution, a patch. However, it remained for the next four years. Without my brother and I using the room, there was no incentive to repair it.
I would return home every year and see the "temporary" lamp still there. Although we could have replaced the bulb, we knew the room remained the same because it felt empty after I left, closely followed by my brother. The blooming lantern is a tribute to my parents. It is meant to replace the old light bulb (and lamp) at the center of the room.
The lantern is in the shape of a geometric lotus. It hangs in the closed (bud) position and slowly pulls itself upward toward the ceiling, gradually blooming. It symbolizes the way my parents have continually bloomed and pulled themselves up through their hard work and hopes. At its center lies the light source, which gradually changes colors. Through their journey, my parents have continually had to change roles as they established their lives in the United States, from immigrants to laborers to parents.
During the day, the lantern is simply a blooming flower on display that moves at a relaxing rate. At night, it provides ambient light, either for mood or actual work.
Manufacturing Processes:
Laser Cutting, Rastering , 3D Printing, Arduino Programming
Mariachi is a traditional type of Mexican folk music, which is known for its cheerful and romantic music repertoire; in Mexico, a mariachi is what you would look for if you wanted to serenade someone.
I played the violin as part of the mariachi since I was nine. Both in my hometown and at Stanford, mariachi members wear highly adorned and tight suits (pictured on the right). Carrying items such as wallets or phones in pockets makes the suit appear less professional, as bulges make it seem excessively tight. Due to frequently moving from place to place to serenade, it is more convenient to be able to carry everything in a single pack.
When designing the product, I hoped to create a matching extension to the mariachi suit on the violin case. For example, the rivets were chosen specifically because of their similarity to the pant's side chains. I also wanted to explore as many aspects as possible in sheet metal forming, from rolling to hemming.
In a group with four amazing people, I was tasked with designing and creating a bipedal robot that could walk on flat terrain and mimic the gait of a bird. We created the Imperial Walker, an AT-ST occasionally masquerading as a dodo, as a solution to this task and to explore 3-D printing as a fabrication tool.
We began by analyzing the gait of different birds (shown in an image below) and designed a linkage that approached the desired movement of the legs. The resulting linkage consisted of a base 8-bar linkage and a double 4-bar parallelization linkage. After exploring different options for driving the linkage, we opted for a chain and sprocket design that fit our selection of batteries and motor. The bird walker successfully traversed flat cement and cobblestone terrain on testing day and remains functional after numerous runs!
Team Members: Javier Reyna, Monica M. Chan, Ryan Lee, Elias Wu
I was part of the Magnetics Group of the Engineering Division at Berkeley Lab, which focuses on the development and analysis of magnetic systems. The laboratory and its researchers ensure that the quality of magnetic components in particle accelerators remains consistent with the tolerances required, which can often reach 25 micrometers in regards to alignment.
The design and manufacturing of particle accelerators requires a stringent measurement of magnetic fields and alignment of magnets. Having magnetic components of the accelerator misaligned or out of tolerance compromises the device’s ability to produce quality synchrotron radiation for soft or hard x-rays. Although precise magnetic measurement devices like Hall Probe sensors exist, they require a large space for operation and fail to accommodate for measurements in small geometries, particularly in difficult to access gaps and small bore undulators.
To address this issue, we developed, assembled, and commissioned a vibrating wire system to obtain magnetic field measurements and align quadrupoles. This system uses a single stretched wire placed in close proximity to the magnet of interest and has a frequency applied to it until the wire vibrates at resonance. Results demonstrate that this greatly amplified vibration allows magnetic fields to be detected and position tracked with a precision up to ten micrometers.
CRII is an autonomous mobile base robot that can dispense poker chips in designated bins. Using state machines, it continuously uses sensor inputs to orient itself on a field and either move to refill its load or deposit additional chips. This is done through line sensing, detecting specific IR signals, and using motors to drive the robot and its limbs.
Team Members: Javier Reyna, Michael Raitor, Emily Cao, Matt Induni
The Instrumental Cue device aims to provide beginners with an interactive approach to learning how to play an instrument through the use of haptic cues. It is a wearable device that mounts itself on a finger and nudges the user’s finger to the correct position in order to play a desired note.
Although it is possible to self-learn how to play an instrument, learning to play instruments can be difficult without assistance from an experienced instructor who can provide feedback. It is this idea of instant feedback, a sense of nudging, that inspired exploration into a prototype device to help beginners achieve introductory proficiency with tones.
In an ideal world, a student would attend music lessons with an experienced instructor and then return home to practice and build upon the skills developed. Unlike a class session, their home does not have an instructor always available to provide feedback. This is where the Instrumental Cue device enters. The device would be able to supplement the material learned from an instructor and provide feedback for at-home practice sessions without the need of an instructor. In the prototype model we used a pseudo electric guitar, which only had one “string,” to test the effectiveness of the device. In contrast to guitars, violins lack frets that inform musicians of the relative location of a note to press on. Therefore, we combined the two by providing a guitar setup and removing the frets. The user would have to learn the location of notes through a combination of muscle memory and sound recognition.
The Theatronics ARK is meant to be a fun interactive art display that tells a short story about the life and environment in our modified planet. It tells the story of a planet where only two seasons exist—winter and summer. As a result, snowmen have developed as a life form alongside humans. During the winter, however, snowmen grow strong and vicious as they hunt for humans. During summer, when snowmen are weak and melting, humans hunt them with ice cream cones in hand.
This is project design to implement event driven programming, sensor integration, filters, and motion control.
The second part of this page is under construction but a full description can be found in the linked button provided.
Team members: Javier Reyna, Sai Koppaka, Aria Tedjarati, and Siddhesh Dhanawade.
For mobility device users, storing and retrieving their devices from the car can be difficult. From our research and interviews, we identified a population of mobility device users who do not yet require a power wheelchair accessible vehicle, but would greatly benefit from a device storage system for their current vehicle. In a ten week mechanical design capstone course, our team worked with global automotive parts manufacturer, Faurecia, to design an improved mobility device storage system for vehicles.
In addressing the need for adaptable mobility device storage systems, we identified that the user population desired solutions that allow them autonomy and independence. Our solution provides users of mobility devices a means of storing devices including walkers, rollators, and manual wheelchairs on their own by use of the easy-to-use, automated Ready-Rack. The Ready-Rack is a motor-powered rack that lowers from the rooftop to the side of the car for attachment of mobility devices. It may be mounted for use of driver or passenger doors, and may be operated from inside the vehicle once the user is comfortably seated. While in its preliminary stages, this novel solution can provide users an affordable, easy-to-use and simply engineered product for mobility device storage. With the development of new attachment systems, the Ready-Rack has the potential to be used as an above-vehicle storage system for just about anything.
“Animal Farm” is meant to be an educational toy children for with visual impairments. It provides highly textured figurines for them to touch and interact with. If a person runs their finger along any of the animals' spines, the capacitive sensor will activate and the animal will produce its respective sound and the acrylic piece behind will light up brightly. The toy can be set up to play like a keyboard, run a simon says- style game, or speak about the animal being touched (in an educational setting).
User Feedback:
Immediate visual and auditory feedback, in addition to touching a physical figure, successfully engaged children and adults experimenting with the current prototype. Most found it enjoyable to play with the animals in keyboard mode, taking their time to listen to the animals and exploring their shape. After including a mode with a description of each animal, children and adults would attentively listen to facts about each of the animal; no prompting to try all of them was required as they did it voluntarily.
* This is currently a prototype
Process:
1. The capacitive sensor works by detecting contact with conductive materials, such as people’s fingers. To make the toys touch sensitive required adding an inlay of non- toxic graphite (shown in black) and a wire (shown in red) connecting it to an Arduino board.
2. To increase the prototyping speed, I used store-bought plastic animals and modified them by drilling a slot for a wire.
3. The spine was also dremeled to add the graphite inlay. The yellow powder was copper, the alternative conductive material for testing.
4. Bright lights were included because of how fulfilling instant feedback is and research indicates that visually impaired people can see bright colors easily. The image to the right shows testing of light diffusion through a non-patterned and a patterned acrylic piece.
The series of black and white nature sketches were drawn using a pen while exploring Yosemite National Park and other areas (hover over the image to see the location or click to enlarge). These could range from 5 minutes frame sketches to longer 45 minute sketches, as it is especially fun to sit down and appreciate nature's details.
Other drawings explore the creation process of the violin, which I play, through different mediums.
Overview:
Because video games and the culture they created were such an integral part in my team’s childhood, we designed and constructed two five-part arcade themed towers, 6 feet and 4 feet tall respectively. These successfully transferred a ping pong ball from the top of the Tetris Tower into the "?" containers inside of the Gameboy Tower.
In a period of four minutes, our small team of four people assembled all eleven parts of the towers and bridge from a six foot radius away. Overall, construction and design took about 52 hours of work for the team.
Materials were limited to foam-core, cardboard, dowels, magnets, and string.
Team Members: Javier Reyna, Annalisa Taylor, Stephen Howell, Kameron Butler
Overview:
In a group of four, I designed and built a non-electrical pinball machine from foam-core.The goal of the game was to score blackjack or be as close as possible to the 21 points to defeat other players. There were 11 possible slots and the cards assigned to each slot retained the values regularly assigned in the actual card game.
I was responsible for implementing a spinning roulette wheel and a hidden card mechanism. Upon launching the first pinball, the roulette wheel would begin to spin and deposit two balls into the game board. These corresponded to the two cards that are usually dealt in the first round. Placing any of the balls into the slots of the cards counted as having been dealt that card. Additionally, there were two hidden cards that a person could attempt to select. If successful, the ball would trigger a mechanism hidden underneath and cause the cards to rise and reveal themselves.
