Ran Dai,
foreground, is working to develop technologies that will help robots
manage their
energy use to improve efficiency and battery life. Many students
are assisting with
the project, including, back row, left to right, Kishan Patel,
Justin Vandentop,
Adam Kaplan and front row, left to right, Nathaniel Kingry
and Yen-Chen Liu.
Larger photo. Photo by Christopher Gannon.
(September 22, 2015) The
small robots in Ran Dai’s basement lab at Iowa State University look like fancy
electronic toys. But they’re really very smart. And they’re getting smarter.
Dai, an Iowa State assistant professor and Black and Veatch
Faculty Fellow in aerospace engineering, is developing power-management
technologies that would allow land- and air-based robots to monitor solar
conditions so they can maximize operating efficiency and battery life.
That’s right. The robots would decide for themselves the
best way to maximize energy production and minimize energy loss.
“It’s these solar-harvesting and power-management functions
that can make any robot work longer, or even permanently,” Dai said. “That
could make these robots smarter than the Mars rovers.”
Those smart robots could be put to work in all kinds of
applications, including search and rescue, agriculture, surveillance or
environmental monitoring.
Dai’s power-management research is supported by a five-year,
$500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant is from the
foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program designed to
support the research and teaching of junior faculty.
Dai has been working on power-management technologies since
her days as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington in
Seattle. That project involved real-time management of aircraft power systems
to increase the energy efficiency of Boeing 787s.