Team plans to improve society by lowering barriers to access robot creation

A team of student researchers, supervised by Prof. Ankur Mehta, won the Best Student Research Demo Award at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO), held last month in Long Beach, CA. They presented their “One Dollar Robots”, which are ultra low-cost and easy to fabricate with widely available raw materials and minimal tooling. These $1 robots could potentially increase student engagement and increase the levels of technology adoption of lower-income families worldwide toward achieving the goal of long-term stability and prosperity of our society while improving the social impact of robotics.

Ph.D. candidate Wenzhong Yan led the team which included Anwesha Chattoraj (first-year Ph.D. student), Warnakulasuriya Shelard R. Fernando(third-year undergraduate student), and Jillian Naldrien Pantig (third-year undergraduate student). The team received a monetary award and a certificate