High IQs and the opportunity to work with the latest high-tech gadgets aren’t the only things students working at university labs have in common. They also seem to have a sense of community and purpose. 

“I have never been to a big university where the competition is cutthroat,” said research assistant Scott Ikenaga, a graduating electrical engineering doctoral candidate. “In our case, it’s about cooperation.”

Ikenaga manages the Advanced Controls and Sensors Laboratory at the university’s Automation Robotics Research Institute. 

He and his partner, Javier Campos, another electrical engineering doctoral student, develop and run complex, real-time software and hardware systems designed to test what is called control theory. 

It involves controlling moving objects the way the scientists want. For example, one of their lab experiments looks like a miniature tank turret with a metal gun barrel. When the turret moves, the long barrel swings in all directions, seemingly uncontrolled. But when Campos and Ikenaga turn on a complex control sensor on the barrel’s side, the motion of the flexible metal tube becomes stabilized. This, if the turret were real, would ensure an accurate shot.

“Working with control theory teaches students that the world is not ideal,” Ikenaga said. 

Campos said that when students test theories on a computer, the simulation is made from a linear model.

“But the world is non-linear,” he said. “When you implement a control theory in the real world, it might not work as it did on the computer.”

While Campos and Ikenaga are perfecting and reworking a multitude of experiments upstairs, downstairs similar students are doing different work.

In Lab I and II, next to the institute’s own machine shop, a former student and several undergraduates work with robots.  The robots are used to do delicate, but fast-paced work ranging from cutting away plastic from the edges of small solar panels to attaching more than 100 miniature rocket motors to missile components.

They must write the code that tells the robot what to do. If something goes wrong, they find it and fix it before moving on to any other tasks.

When the robot is working, students are nowhere near it.

“It moves pretty fast,” said mechanical engineering junior Cyrus Rahimzadeh. “We stay way away from it just in case it moves in a direction we don’t anticipate.”

There are two types of robots in the labs. One is called a SCARA, or a selectively compliant assembly robot arm. It’s also referred to as a four-degrees of freedom robot because it can move an object in 4 distinct ways, either in a line or a circle. Another robot, called a 6-degrees of freedom robot, is preferred among students because it moves faster and more fluidly.

“It is a lot more flexible,” Rahimzadeh said. “It can move in all directions. It is very precise.”

That particular robot comes from Sweden and costs about $100,000.

While students in Lab I do experiments and create working prototypes of all kinds, in Lab II a former student actually uses the prototypes that students make. 

Glen Oliver, a senior production technology engineer, can’t seem to stay away from the robotics institute. After working there as a student for seven years, he now works for Lockheed Martin, a local defense contractor. 

He takes prototypes that students develop and readies them for use in industry.

“I am down to spending 2 hours a week at my office (at Lockheed Martin),” he said. “I like what I do. It’s quite exciting.”

Oliver says that the advantages of using robots for defense work is often times employees are working with explosives, so a robot makes the job safer.

“The advantage is that the robot takes the risk.”