Engineering

With Sustainable Development Goal 6, "Clean Water and Sanitation", the United Nations aims for a universal access to safe and affordable drinking water. However, in 2017, 800 million people still lacked access to basic drinking water services, especially in rural areas. Photovoltaic water pumping systems (PVWPSs) are an interesting solution to improve water access, as they are economically competitive in isolated areas and have low maintenance requirements.

When we hand an object to another human we let go only when we know the recipient has achieved a secure grasp. How do we "know" that the recipient has a secure grasp on the object? Humans rely on touch sensing to monitor and mediate this "handover" process. A subtle aspect of this process is that we use "active perception" to detect the quality of the recipient's grasp.

One of the fundamental problems in the field of human/robot interactions (HRI) is the process of handing objects between a human and a robot. As when humans hand off an object from one person to another, there are many physical cues that mediate the transfer. When a robot hands an object to a human it must know when to let go, least the object falls to the ground. There are subtle cues that reveal how securely the human recipient is holding the object being received.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of devices for rapid and sensitive detection of infectious diseases at the point of care (POC). A simplified, low-cost, and deployable assay for rapid and frequent tests for viral RNAs is needed to quickly assess and mitigate the progression of pandemics. We propose a low cost, deployable and sensitive detection microfluidic device which will use electric fields to enhance viral RNA assays.

Extending the lifetime and capabilities of satellites and spacecraft has significant impact to the society. Reliable and efficient space propulsion systems are therefore the key for the aerospace sector. One possible solution can be provided by the Hall Effect Thruster (HET). A HET is a space propulsion device that relies on electro-magnetic forces to accelerate an ionized gas, a plasma, from an annular cavity into the space vacuum. The generated thrust is low but the thruster efficiency remains high, which is crucial for space applications.

Project's goal lies in the intersection of biology and machine learning, the tool which successfully allows scientists today to work with big data and make predictive analyses. This combination will be used in the project to improve existing software, which will allow predicting cell growth in the next minutes based on multiple factors and properties of cells with the accuracy close to 100%. The aims for the project are the final application and a publication of scientific paper with the presented software.

The phenomenon of reproduction is fundamentally important to any growing society; yet, many of the details surrounding the “mystery of life” still elude even the scientific and engineering communities. This reality is all too painful for the nearly 10% of married, child-bearing age American and French couples who experience problems with fertility and turn to assisted reproductive technologies, despite the fact that they boast high costs (> $12,000 USD) and low success rates (< 50%).

Analysis of walking abnormalities is an important clinical assessment used for treatment of gait disorders in children with cerebral palsy (CP). Camerabased motion capture, the current gold standard, enables practitioners to perform gait analyses with high accuracy. However, the technology can only be used in the laboratory where motion capture is constrained to a limited space and incurs significant expense. Mobile systems are now possible using light-weight wearable sensors known as inertial measurement units (IMU).