September 8, 2012

Drexel Engineers Build Trifecta of Robots to Navigate Underwater, Ground and Aerial




Four undergraduate Drexel students spent the summer months building underwater, ground and aerial robots under the guidance of two graduate students and assistant teaching professor Dr. Pramod Abichandani.

“We call it the trifecta,” Abichandani, who is an assistant teaching professor of the College of Engineering, said of the three projects.

The team members work in pairs or singly on each robot while helping each other out and calling on graduate students Sean Wagoner and Chris Berry when necessary.

Damien Turchi and Cezary Mlynarz, who are incoming sophomores studying Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics (MEM), are working together on the underwater robot which has a camera attached to help observe visible levels of pollution in the Schuylkill River. They’ve also hooked the robot up a to video game controller to make underwater steering intuitive for users.