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Orientation Video Transcript

Participants:  Vijay Jain, 2007 ISEF Scholar, Harvard University, Biochemistry; Jinju Yi, 2007 ISEF Scholar, Stanford University, Biochemistry

Transcript:

Taylor: This is basically designing what’s called a Whegs™ robot and USARSim. So, you should probably know what USARSim is and what Whegs are. USARSim is a high-fidelity simulation environment. It stands for Urban Search and Rescue Simulation. It’s built on top of the Unreal Tournament 2004 game, and what it allows you to do is to create a robot very easily and then to create a world for that robot, and then you can put the robot in the world and the game’s physics engine handles all of the interactions and dynamics and mechanics of how the robot interacts with the world. So, if you throw a baseball at the robot, the baseball should probably change with directions, moving and things like that. Whegs is actually a series of robots that was developed at Case Western Reserve University, which is where I’m at.  So, basically it uses a spoked appendage.  Think of like a wheel with spokes but without the rim. So, it combines the speed and simplicity of wheels with the climbing ability of legs. A wheel is very easy to deal with. We know how it works, and it can go really fast on flat terrain. Legs are really good for climbing over things. So by using this, you can have a robot move like a wheeled vehicle, but it can climb over things a lot better than the wheeled vehicle is able to do.

Question:Do you plan to continue this research in the future, and if not, what other topics are of interest to you?

Taylor:  I definitely plan to continue research in this area in the future. So, I’m actually working on doing some more follow-up work with this to make my simulation a little bit better. I’m going to continue with this with my advisor back at Case Western Reserve. He’s the one who actually came up with the Whegs design originally and with the researchers at NIST, which is where I did my internship.

Question: How has the DHS Fellowship influenced your education and professional development?

Taylor:  I would say this has definitely opened my eyes to lots of different career paths and different avenues. So before starting with the program, I was only thinking, “Well, I’m going to go to school, I’ll get my Ph.D., and then I’ll be a professor. And then by doing this internship, it’s a whole new world of different things that I could go after. I hadn’t thought about going into just doing research at a national lab or one of the national institutes or things like that.  And it’s also kind of opened my eyes up to some different research paths as well. So, it’s been a very eye-opening experience.