Computer Engineering Commons^™

Soft Foam Robot With Caterpillar-Inspired Gait Regimes For Terrestrial Locomotion, Cassandra M. Donatelli, Zachary T. Serlin, Piers Echols-Jones, Anthony E. Scibelli, Alexandra Cohen, Jeanne-Marie Musca, Shane Rozen-Levy, David Buckingham, Robert White, Barry A. Trimmer

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Caterpillars are the soft bodied larvae of lepidopteran insects. They have evolved to occupy an extremely diverse range of natural environments and to locomote in complex three-dimensional structures without articulated joint or hydrostatic control. These animals make excellent bio-inspiration for the field of soft robotics because of their diversity and adaptability. In this paper, we present SquMA Bot, a caterpillar-inspired soft robot. The robot's body is primarily composed of a soft viscoelastic foam, and it is actuated using a motor-tendon system. SquMA Bot is able to mimic the inching gait of a caterpillar and can use its flexible body to …

Analytical Modeling Of A Communication Channel Based On Subthreshold Stimulation Of Neurobiological Networks, Alireza Khodaei

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The emergence of wearable and implantable machines manufactured artificially or synthesized biologically opens up a new horizon for patient-centered health services such as medical treatment, health monitoring, and rehabilitation with minimized costs and maximized popularity when provided remotely via the Internet. In particular, a swarm of machines at the scale of a single cell down to the nanoscale can be deployed in the body by the non-invasive or minimally invasive operation (e.g., swallowing and injection respectively) to perform various tasks. However, an individual machine is only able to perform basic tasks so it needs to exchange data with the others …

How Useful Is Gsv As An Environmental Observation Tool? An Analysis Of The Evidence So Far., Katherine Nesse, Leah Airt

SPU Works

Researchers in many disciplines have turned to Google Street View to replace pedestrian- or carbased in-person observation of streetscapes. It is most prevalent within the research literature on the relationship between neighborhood environments and public health but has been used as diverse as disaster recovery, ecology and wildlife habitat, and urban design. Evaluations of the tool have found that the results of GSV-based observation are similar to the results from in-person observation although the similarity depends on the type of characteristic being observed. Larger, permanent and discrete features showed more consistency between the two methods and smaller, transient and judgmental …

Scalable Data Structure To Compress Next-Generation Sequencing Files And Its Application To Compressive Genomics, Sandino Vargas-Perez, Fahad Saeed

Parallel Computing and Data Science Lab Technical Reports

It is now possible to compress and decompress large-scale Next-Generation Sequencing files taking advantage of high-performance computing techniques. To this end, we have recently introduced a scalable hybrid parallel algorithm, called phyNGSC, which allows fast compression as well as decompression of big FASTQ datasets using distributed and shared memory programming models via MPI and OpenMP. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a novel parallel data structure which lessens the dependency on decompression and facilitates the handling of DNA sequences in their compressed state using fine-grained decompression in a technique that is identified as in …

A Fast And Efficient Python Library For Interfacing With The Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank, Andrey Smelter, Morgan Astra, Hunter N. B. Moseley

Center for Environmental and Systems Biochemistry Faculty Publications

Background: The Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank (BMRB) is a public repository of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopic data of biological macromolecules. It is an important resource for many researchers using NMR to study structural, biophysical, and biochemical properties of biological macromolecules. It is primarily maintained and accessed in a flat file ASCII format known as NMR-STAR. While the format is human readable, the size of most BMRB entries makes computer readability and explicit representation a practical requirement for almost any rigorous systematic analysis.

Results:To aid in the use of this public resource, we have developed a package called …

Superhero Robotics, Frank Sup, Brian Umberger, Nick Sawyer

Science and Engineering Saturday Seminars

No abstract provided.

Rainbow Peacock Spiders Inspire Miniature Superiridescent Optics, Bor-Kai Hsiung, Radwanul Hasan Siddique, Doekele G. Stavenga, Jürgen C. Otto, Michael C. Allen, Ying Liu, Yongfeng Lu, Dimitri D. Deheyn, Matthew D. Shawkey, Todd A. Blackledge

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Colour produced by wavelength-dependent light scattering is a key component of visual communication in nature and acts particularly strongly in visual signalling by structurallycoloured animals during courtship. Two miniature peacock spiders (Maratus robinsoni and M. chrysomelas) court females using tiny structured scales (~ 40 × 10 μm²) that reflect the full visual spectrum. Using TEM and optical modelling, we show that the spiders’ scales have 2D nanogratings on microscale 3D convex surfaces with at least twice the resolving power of a conventional 2D diffraction grating of the same period. Whereas the long optical path lengths required …

Biosimp: Using Software Testing Techniques For Sampling And Inference In Biological Organisms, Mikaela Cashman, Jennie L. Catlett, Myra B. Cohen, Nicole R. Buan, Zahmeeth Sakkaff, Massimiliano Pierobon, Christine A. Kelley

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Years of research in software engineering have given us novel ways to reason about, test, and predict the behavior of complex software systems that contain hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Many of these techniques have been inspired by nature such as genetic algorithms, swarm intelligence, and ant colony optimization. In this paper we reverse the direction and present BioSIMP, a process that models and predicts the behavior of biological organisms to aid in the emerging field of systems biology. It utilizes techniques from testing and modeling of highly-configurable software systems. Using both experimental and simulation data we show …