Month: January 2019
The Challenges of Designing Something from Nothing
By Will R., Senior
For my research project this year, I am looking into robotic birds. As with many animal-mimicking robots, their performance generally correlates with how well they replicate the real thing. In birds, one feature that is very important to their efficiency and maneuverability is their feathers. Because their wings move up and down, a bird’s flight feathers, among other purposes, acts as a sort of aerodynamic check valve. In other words, they catch air on the downstroke to produce lift, but delaminate on the upstroke, allowing air to pass through the wings thereby not producing negative lift that pushes the bird back down.
(photo credit: The Robinson Library)
In order to test the viability of an artificial-feathered wing on an ornithopter (robotic bird), I first have to make a platform to move the wing up and down. The problem was, there wasn’t a specific item that I was designing it around. I first noticed this when I started planning my budget and had to find a motor that would work.
There are several important specifications of electric motors that had to be considered. I knew I wanted to use a brushless outrunner motor, but I also had to decide on the its mass, power, and kV rating (the rotations per minute per volt of input). The problem was, I had nothing to define the parameters. The required kV and power output depended on the wing-flapping rate, which depended both on the size of the wings and the weight of the entire platform, which goes back to the mass of the motor, being one of the heavier components.
To get around this, I did a couple of things. To start, I decided on modeling the ornithopter to an extent based on a real bird. This helped by giving me at least a tentative goal for total weight, considering the fact that I could never make an ornithopter fly that was heavier than a real bird (which has essentially perfect efficiency) of the same physical size. I set my goal for 2 kg and an estimate for the wing-flapping rate up to 3 beats per second (180 bpm). Knowing this, I designed a gearbox to reduce the rotational velocity of the motor, as there aren’t many electric motors with a kV low enough to achieve this in a direct drive fashion. In order to find the smallest/lightest motor that would still be strong enough to power the bird, I still need to know how much power it requires. To measure this, I opted for a motor that would, if anything, be overpowered. That will, however, allow me to at least get it working on the testing mechanism, and I can then use a Watt meter to see if a less powerful motor would potentially work.
What I’ve learned from having so many variables that depend on each other is that eventually I had to just make my best educated guess on one of them, and the others would fall into place. If my initial guess happens to be wrong, as it has been at least once so far, it soon becomes obvious and I can use that to make a better estimate the next time.
Nothing to See Here, Just a Green Thumb
By Christine C., Senior
If it’s between 12:00 PM and 1:40 PM on a school day, and you happen to be in the hallway that runs from the research room to the main entrance, you’re likely to notice the frequent journeys of a certain student up and down this stretch.
Sometimes, she might be carrying a bunch of long metal poles, doing her best to look like she’s not about to drop them. Other times, she’ll speed walk down the hallway, keys jangling obnoxiously, and disappear into a locked room with scary warning signs on the door. When she walks back to the research room, you’ll probably see her enter a strange tent with an emanating purple glow. You may have even seen her at Tonkadale before, digging through a dumpster full of pots. Inevitably, you wonder: “What is she doing?”
Well, you’re about to get the inside scoop from the girl herself. Any mad scientist type ideas you’ve got going on are not quite correct. In fact, they couldn’t be farther from the truth. All I am doing is…
*Insert drum roll here*
Growing plants!
Yes, that is the mysteriousness that I’m up to in research this year. I’m growing two sets of plants, which is the reason for all the running back and forth – I’m going to simulate climate change conditions for one set by pumping carbon dioxide into their tent. Figuring out a way to safely elevate the carbon dioxide level always seemed a little complex, but you’d think that growing the plants would be pretty straight forward, right? Don’t you just get some dirt and water and plop some seeds in there?
It turns out that trying to get sunflowers and canola to grow inside, during the winter, requires some other materials, like grow tents (hence the long poles) and grow lights (hence the purple glow). It also requires some knowledge of how canola works – apparently there are two types of canola, a piece of information I figured out after I’d already ordered the kind that needs to be frozen as a seedling. Who woulda known?
Eventually, the new canola seeds arrived, and both grow tents were all set up, and my back was just about broken from scooping dirt into pots. I was ready to plant.
‘Twas a momentous event – all my work in research thus far had led up to it. Would my little seeds grow?
Spoiler alert: they did!
My seedlings may be small, but they’re popping up into the world, and growing with all their might. They’ve inspired me to match their energy – if they can turn from tiny little seeds into baby plants in only three days, I can run up and down the hallway to water them, and collect data, and adjust grow lights. Together, my seedlings and I can help create a better understanding of how climate change is going to impact plants. So prepare to keep watching me dart up and down the hall – slow walking isn’t going to cut it.
Boxing Out Injuries
by Olivia G., Junior
I started playing basketball in fourth grade. I was on the grey team. My little team was made up of fellow Minnewashta students. I don’t think we did very well that year, but I do have fond memories of being jealous of Pink Team’s pink shirts and Purple Team’s purple shirts. Grey seemed too boring for a basketball star like myself. I even won a Lynx shirt for making the Bank Shot at a basketball clinic. I loved it.
I continued to practice hard, I shot hoops with my older sister and even made the A team. And oh those Rochester tournaments are a blast, even though the hotel managed to mess up our reservations every year. We were young and spry. When we fell down we’d jump back up and get going again. Injuries were minimal, girls wore knee pads and ankle braces more as a fashion trend than injury prevention.
Basketball took up a lot of my time for the next four years. I had a great time, but as time went on I started enjoying it less and less. I decided to quit basketball after my eighth grade season. At that point I didn’t think I would step on a court again, except maybe to shoot hoops during gym class.
When I walked into the first day of research I didn’t know what I would be studying.
What do ya know, I found a way back to basketball.
After talking to my research teacher about my ideas, I mentioned ACL injuries. They were on my mind because a girl on my team tore hers a few days prior. It was the third time a friend of mine received the news they wouldn’t play for nine months. I spent some time looking into the subject and was very interested. I guess my main motivation was “wow ACL injuries are awful, I seem to hear about another one every week. I’d really like to do something about that” and off I went.
Next thing I know, I’m standing in Crown College, with a mentor, holding a twenty year old dissertation on the relationship between the hormone relaxin and injuries in female athletes. With help from my mentor, I wrote a research proposal and created an online questionnaire. This online survey acts as a daily log for a group of female athletes to fill out every day. The questionnaire includes questions regarding to amount of sleep, general physical and mental status, day of menstrual cycle, current ailments, etc. This data will be compiled at the conclusion of the study and hopefully some trends will appear.
Guess who my test subjects are…. the Minnetonka girls basketball program. Turns out I can’t stay away from basketball after all.
Even though the subject of my research is on general injuries in female athletes, I am constantly reminded of how important this type of research really is. Nearly a third of my high school soccer team have had knee injuries. My club soccer team alone has girls with chronic back pain, consistently rolled ankles, numerous concussions, and various knee injuries. My research won’t erase these problems, but it is a start. It has made me much more aware of what factors affect performance and how we can learn to train smarter. I hope that I can spread this awareness with the girls basketball program because they won’t be on the Pink team forever.
From Computer Science to Dirt Data
By Dean M., Senior
a photo of dirt being scooped with a plastic spoon
(credit: Tristan Cordier).
Last year I would not have expected to have a mentor who emails me a picture of someone scooping dirt. Especially because back in May the only thing narrowing down the vast realm of potential research topics was that I wanted to do something computer science related. (Or maybe biology related. I also hadn’t ruled out environmental science.)
As my summer went by, the same thing happened everytime I sat down to narrow down my research topic. I would read articles upon articles until I realized that instead of “narrowing down” what I wanted to research, I had instead looked into a plethora of different subjects and broadened my scope of potential topics.
When it came time to complete the first summer assignment, choosing a general topic area, I put down category #20 “Robotics and Intelligent Machines” and moved on because it seemed most similar to where I’d eventually end up if I pursued a computer science-based project; but, after re-reading the list of research topic categories, category #8 caught my eye. Instead of ignoring the notion, I figured I may as well look into that field as well since after all, I was nowhere near having found a topic.
Category #8 was “Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.” Unlike the other topics I had investigated, the first publication I read within its domain immediately “clicked.” Not only was I intrigued by the content, it seemed like something I could accomplish. It was a recent 2017 study about using machine learning in biomonitoring. At the time, I didn’t understand a good portion of the paper itself. “High-throughput sequencing data”, “metabarcoding”, and “Illumina pipelines” were all terms I had never come in contact with in the past. I knew I couldn’t just ignore the science-y buzzwords and move on so instead I went through with the arduous task of understanding each term one by one.
To my surprise, comprehending the article wasn’t as painful as I expected. It was actually intriguing more than anything. After finally getting a basic grasp of the concepts I started to think about who I would contact as a possible mentor. Finding a mentor seemed like a daunting task, especially when there was only a short list of researchers I could find who happened to have experience applying machine learning to biomonitoring. That is why I figured I may as well ask the author of the work that sparked my interest in the first place.
After reaching out to my first possible mentor, I waited. And waited. And waited. With no response and an increasing need to solidify my topic, I reached out to a man from the same university. This time, I got a response. One saying he was too busy to help me, but that he had a coworker who might be able to be of assistance. Well it turns out the coworker he referred me to was the first man I emailed. Initially, this felt like an awkward and unintentional follow up email; but I guess the referral worked because a few days later, I got a note saying the author of the publication was willing to help me with my research.
For me, this was a turning point. I finally felt like I had settled on a project, one I didn’t expect to have wound up working on. Although I didn’t expect to be diving in headfirst into bioinformatics, I also didn’t expect to have gone from an interest in computer science to learning how dirt turns into data.
Beyond the Glass 