Work in the laboratory was begun in spring 2005 and the research here generally deals with topics including robot-assisted surgery, haptics, and interactive physical simulations. The common element in this work is that direct physical interaction is involved between human users and robotic devices.
Active Projects:
Inactive Projects:
Characteristics of the current Prototypes:
Components of the Prototype:
The base of this magnetic leviation device contains an array of cylindrical electromagnet coils which generate repulsive forces and torques to levitate and manipulate a platform containing 4 disk magnets. The basic module shown will be able to scale to larger area coil arrays with multiple levitated platforms to support a human user and simulate arbitrary vehicles, as shown below.