Dexter Watkins

Hi guys!  I'm Dexter Watkins, and I will be a senior at Vanderbilt this coming school year.  I'm majoring in Mechanical Engineering, with minors in Computer Science and Chinese.  I am your typical nerd, into video games, comics/manga, fantasy and sci-fi novels, and D&D.  

This summer I am working in the MEDLab here at Vanderbilt.  I've worked in this lab last semester, developing a deployment device for an active cannula as well as helping run a few experiments on a steerable needle, but this summer I will be starting a new project and work on ressurecting an old haptic robotic arm that has been sitting in one of Vandy's mechanical engineering labs for the past 15 years.  It was originally built for a student's master's thesis, and as the years have gone by its parts have been cannibalized for use in other projects.  All that remains now are the motors, potentiometers, and the carbon fiber arm itself.  

Project goals are to buy amplifiers and interface the robot with a computer (we'll be using Simulink and mathwork's xPC OS).  Next will be to implement position control.  Finally, we will be prepare the robot for fluid power interaction, most likely interacting with a pneumatic cylinder or setting up a master-slave control scheme with a fluid powered robot  in another of the engineering labs here at Vandy.

So far, I have the power supply and amplifiers ordered (thank you AMC for the great discount!) and am building the emergency stop circuitry from scratch, which is slow going but a lot of fun.