Meet The Team

Nicole Malow is a senior studying bioengineering, electrical engineering, and computer science with an interest in medical device design for the purposes of making healthcare more accessible and affordable. With robotics, Nicole is excited about the potential to accomplish tasks with a precision beyond human capabilities, especially in regards to robotic laparoscopic surgery. Furthermore, she is interested in challenges in controllability, including in the control of nano-scale robots. For this project, Nicole took part in the sensing, planning, and actuation of Ada. For the computer vision portion, she developed a method of parsing the data received from Mathpix. For the planning portion of the project, she developed mathematical equations expressing the desired path for Ada to trace out a function or to write a digit anywhere on the board that the user specifies as the starting position. She combined this with MoveIt! IK solver. She also implemented a method of writing numbers consecutively relative to a specified starting position. For actuation, Nicole adjusted the level of the board and worked with Baxter and Sawyer to determine the best robot to use for execution. She also implemented a smoother path with a Cartesian path planner built into MoveIt!

Jessica Malow is a fourth year studying bioengineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. Her interests include nanorobotics, AI/ML, and microelectromechanical systems. She is highly motivated to improve health care through medical device design to make personalized care more attainable. As part of this project, Jessica worked on generating ideas and implementing them for actuation, path planning, and computer vision. More specifically, she worked on implementing a machine learning algorithm for detecting mathematical expressions, a mechanism for translating camera coordinates to the end effector frame, and the trajectory and path planning with an IK solver for writing out numbers. 

Ahan Sabharwal is a 4th-year studying Data Science, CS, and Robotics. He's interested in machine learning and Big Data systems. 

For our project, he worked on creating the spring contraption for the actuation of the robot, assisted with the integration between multiple functions of the project, and live demo planning. 

The spring contraption allowed the robot to write complete digits & graphs and solved the issue where our robot was writing disconnected dots rather than smooth numbers/graphs. Ahan also helped with the testing of our systems through collaboration with multiple members of our team. 

Zoltan Williamson is a 4th-year studying EECS. 

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For the project, Zoltan worked on sensing and integration. This involved getting snapshots from the attached USB camera, running these snapshots through Mathpix to convert the written data to Latex, parsing the Latex output into data able to be evaluated by Python, and integrating each subsection together into the final project. 

Allen is a 4th-year student studying Computer Science.

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Allen's contributions to the project include: (1) developing the initial object segmentation and recognition methods for numbers and operations and (2) designing and implementing the guardrails and attachment mechanism for the pen-holding mechanism, and (3) developing the code to work with the MathPix API.