The robotics team this year did great work. They were split up into a few smaller teams of one or two students to a team and tackled some very complex engineering projects.
The first team worked in the Test Beam, designing a Labview software package that could replace aging hardwired electronics. The successfully built a Labview software system that could read two phototubes and gather cosmic ray data.
The second team worked at Lab 8, upgrading a 30 year old precision robot to interface with modern computers. They added the ability to command the robot to autonomously assemble chips. They also added precision image recognition to allow the robot to pick up and put down parts with 1/10000 of a inch precision. This robot will be used to fabricate Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMIC's) for the Q/U Imaging ExperimenT
The third student worked alone in the Fermilab Electrical Engineering Department. He designed a Labview software package to test assembled MMIC chips.
The last robotics project was not carried out by a robotics student, but by an astronomy student. Chris Stoughton, a scientist at the Fermilab Holometer project, needed a device to test wind speed, so the student volunteered to build one.
Further details on the wind sensor are here
The Double Pendulum Experiment was an experiment carried out by the robotics group into the chaotic motion of a double pendulum. Double pendulums are a pendulum fixed to a point with another pendulum hanging from their free moving end. The motion of the system is deterministic, but chaotic.
The students got very interesting results, and did some very interesting analysis:
This is a video of sixteen double pendulum runs from roughly the same initial positions that yielded chaotic motion.
Each jointed, colored line is a representation of the motion of the double pendulum used in the experiment, overlaid to show the differences
This is a video of sixteen double pendulum runs from roughly the same initial positions that yielded stable motion.
This is a graph of the cumulative angle of each pendulum arm. The top arm is in light colors, and the bottom arm is in darker colors. Notice the periodicity of the the swing.
This is a graph of the cumulative angle of each pendulum arm. The top arm is in light colors, and the bottom arm is in darker colors. Notice how the top arm remains mostly periodic, but the bottom arm quickly goes to chaos.
This is a graph of the standard deviation of the bottom arm of the pendulum over sixteen runs. Notice how the deviation is periodic; when the pendulum has swung up, there is less energy available for the arms to swing about. When the pendulum is at the bottom of it's swing, there is more energy available.
This graph is a trace of the relative position of the end of the pendulum over time. notice how it is often at the bottom of the outer circle and in the inner circle. However, other than that, it is unpredictable.
The code used to do this project is available here.
The final presentation of this project is available here.