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Gallery of Student/Faculty Work

Maurice Tombé, Robot for Doug Hamby Dance

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Also known as PDR-1A (Prototype Demining Robot 1A), Maurice is a robot developed by Dr. Tony Farquhar of UMBC with more than 20 UMBC engineering students, including Darian Robbins, a senior mechanical engineering student and Meyerhoff Scholar who is an intern at NASA's Goddard facility in Maryland; Byron Stancil, a senior mechanical engineering student and Meyerhoff Scholar who is an intern at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Todd McCleaf, a junior mechanical engineering student who also collaborated with Doug Hamby to program Maurice's movements. The project was partially funded by a grant to Doug Hamby and Tony Farquhar from the UMBC Designated Research Initiative Fund. The robot's six legs and one arm are actuated by miniature servo motors with the onboard controller receiving instructions from a remote laptop computer in a unique hybrid evolving from simpler subunits made by Lynxmotion. The goal of the dance project was to explore the artistic limits of the robot's unusual if limited movement repertoire. Maurice will next play a central role in a related project aimed at developing novel technologies for deactivating unexploded antipersonnel land mines.

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