Jason Mathew, SEAS ’27, Ellicott City, MD
I am extremely grateful for the 2024 Summer Funding award I received which helped me be able to stay at Penn over the summer and conduct meaningful research at the GRASP Lab. This summer, I got to experience for the first time working in a robotics lab; seeing drones, humanoid robots, and ground rovers running around in the lab took me quite a bit of time to get used to. My project specifically focused on ‘soft robotics’, an application of robotics that focuses on soft materials and is often used in healthcare.
The project itself was to figure out a way to use pneumatic forces to take the pressure off of patient’s body parts. Other previous methods included inflating and deflating a pre-set inflatable that must have a constant power in it to inflate and deflate it. The design I worked on utilized silicone membranes with stabilizing rings in them, such that only certain parts of the circular membrane actually stretched when inflated. My role in the project was to fabricate and test the membranes to measure force vs. internal air pressure on a test rig. I learned how to use Arduino working with the test rig and also gained more experience interfacing with electrical components in Python.
Another part of the project I worked on was designing and CADding another test rig to allow membranes to be able to lift up an object, which brought us closer to being able to use an array of the membranes to lift up an object to a certain height and with a specific force. Overall, this summer was extremely useful in building my experience with research and helping me explore more about what I want to do when I graduate.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2024 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
