A Break for the Projects
Posted by Nicole Sharp on 05 March 2005 at 14:01Well, mid-terms week has now been kind enough to end, and I'm now writing from my parents' home in Atlanta, after having left my bed at Case around 5:50 this morning in order to finish packing and get to the airport on time. I've had the requisite strawberry limeade from Sonic, so that makes Spring Break official.
It's been a major week for most of projects this semester. We had a project proposal due for Professional Communication (ENGL 398N) on Friday, and I gave two presentations Thursday evening for my other projects of the semester. The first, which I'm completing for EMAE 283, is an investigation of the drag on different parts of the Micro Air and Land Vehicle (MALV) that the University of Florida developed and is now collaborating with Case on. Case provided the Whegs that lets the miniature MALV traverse rough terrain, and now my partner and I are looking at the drag characteristics of the MALV's fuselage and its 12 inch wingspan to find ways of improving its ability to fly. We haven't started testing in the student wind tunnel yet, but yesterday we did start machining the test stand we designed for the experiment. Although it's only been a few semesters since I had my course in machining, it definitely feels like it's been much longer. I'd forgotten quite a bit about using a milling machine, but at least I picked things up again relatively quickly. With luck, we'll finish machining the stand on the Monday after next when we return to campus.
The second project that I presented on Thursday night was another biorobotics project. This semester I'm taking part in an interdisciplinary biorobotics team (course EMAE/BIOL 377), and our project for the semester is to investigate attachment devices. More practically, we are working to create feet for Robot V, the latest in the cockroach series of robots constructed here at Case. My particular role in the project is to create pads for the foot designs we've made, which means that I have the unique pleasure of working to create pads for both active and passive foot designs. So far it looks like we'll be trying a simple ball-and-joint passive design first, so I will likely spend part of my break creating ProE models of the molds I'll machine once I get back. I'll use those to create pads out of a high-coefficient of friction material called Flexene.
In the meantime, I can always write survey questions for that ENGL 398N project on altering the METCALF lab in Glennan.