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Robotics and BioEngineering Research

Departments of Mechanical Engineering and BioEngineering

Division of Engineering & Applied Science,
California Institute of Technology
Thomas Laboratory,
Mail Code 104-44

A neural prosthesis as a ``direct brain interface that enables a human, via the use of surgically implanted electrode arrays and associated computer decoding algorithms, to control external electromechanical devices by pure thought alone. In this manner, some useful functions that have been lost through disease or accident can be partially restored. Patients who might benefit from such a prosthesis would include those with spinal cord sections or lesions, peripheral nerve disease, stroke to motor cortex, and ALS. Our lab collaborates with the laboratories of Prof. Richard Andersen and Prof. Y.C. Tai to develop neural prostheses and brain-machine interfaces. Our group focuses on these main issues:

• Autonomously Moving Neural Recording Probes
• Neural decoding algorithms

Approximately 250,000 people in the U.S. suffer from a major Spinal Cord Injury (SCI), and ~11,000 new people will be afflicted each year. Our lab collaborates with Prof. Reggie Edgerton at UCLA to develop new therapies and new technologies that hopefully one day will enable patients suffering from SCI, stroke, or major injury to partially or fully recover the ability to walk. Currently, we focus on these topics:

• New robotic mechanisms for active rehabilitation of SCI in animal (mice) models.
• New adaptive training algorithms to optimize the rehabilitation afforded by robotic devices
• Drug therapies to improve locomotion recovery
• Novel stimulating electrodes for locomotion recovery

``Sensor Based Planning incorporates sensor information, reflecting the current state of the environment, into a robot's planning process, as opposed to classical planning , where full knowledge of the world's geometry is assumed to be known prior to the planning event. Processing the sensory data for subsequent use in planning also offers many challenges Current interests include

• Sensor-based motion planning algorithms
• Scan-based odometry
• Multi-scale data processing for localization and mapping
• New feature extraction techniques

Teams of robots can potentially accomplish tasks that are not feasible by a single robot, or they can potentially accomplish the same task with less time or improved capability. Our group studies the following issues in multi-robot cooperation:

• Cooperative sensing. How can a team of robots best cooperate to gather information?
• Multi-robot boundary coverage.
• Decision making in multi-robot teams

Squid, Salps, and Jellyfish propel themselves via pulsatile jets of vortices. We are trying to understand if this form of propulsion offers a viable alternative for the propulsion of small, cheap, slow, but highly maneuverable underwater vehicles. Our goals are to develop predictive models of pulsatile jet forming devices (such as synthetic jets) and build proof-of-concept prototype propulsers.

We are trying to develop techniques for highly automated motion tracking of biological organisms in controlled laboratory environments. These techniques could be potentially applied to high-throughput behavior screening for molecular, cell, and developmental biology, as well as to capture complex behavioral data for research in neuroethology and biopsychology. Our long term goal is to develop a framework where the basic tracking engine can be readily adapted to different organisms by non-specialists.