BRL graduate student Katherine Pratt wins CSNE Perfect Pitch Competition!

Last Friday, BRL-affiliated graduate students Katherine Pratt and Tim Brown competed in the NSF Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering Perfect Pitch competition. The competition challenges students to condense their research into a 90 second elevator pitch that succinctly conveys the goals and value of their work. Each pitch is then judged by a panel of CSNE-affiliated industry members and entrepreneurs on both the merit of the work and the presentation sytle. When the final results were tallied, Katherine was awarded with first place in the competition! A video of her pitch is included below. Congratulations Katherine!

BRL Contributes two papers to We Robot 2015

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We Robot posted the papers to be discussed next week at upcoming conference at the University of Washington. The conference deals with various ethical and legal issues surrounding near-future technologies. The BioRobotics lab contributed two papers to the conference that refer to our ongoing work in teleoperation security and closed-loop DBS systems. We are really looking forward to seeing what discussions these papers generate!

Feel free to read the papers or watch the panel discussions from the conference which have been published online at the below links-

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BRL mentored summer students featured in CSNE YSP/REU Promotional Videos

This summer, the BRL hosted a number of summer students from either local high-schools or various undergraduate programs. Hannah Werbel, now a highschool senior, was interviewed about her experiences in the Young Scholars Program (YSP) by the CSNE:

Also interviewed were Joi Officer and Francisco Garcia who discussed their research experiences through the Research Experience for Undergrads (REU) Program. Check out their video here:

Smart Emergency Response System featured in Huffington Post

A Huffington Post article published today overviews the recent Smart America Challenge that the BRL participated in. The UW BioRobotics lab worked with a team of researchers and engineers from multiple institutions to demonstrate a new approach to disaster response. Check out the full article here

This video was produced and posted by NSF, check out their news release here

BRL shows off at the UW SmartAmerica Challenge Event!

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The Smart Emergency Response System team that includes the BioRobotics Lab showcased their ongoing collaborative efforts to build novel haptic and teleoperated system to enhance disaster response. You can read more about the event at the C4C website here.

The ongoing work is shown in the video below, where a drone tracks and follows a teleoperated robot for communication and relaying information between operator and remote system. This particular demonstration was done at the Boeing Collaborative Systems Lab.