Lentink Lab
Engineering Researcher | April 2017 - April 2018
The Lentink Lab is a Mechanical Engineering lab at Stanford that researches the mechanics of bird flight. The lab uses a combination of biomechanical experimentation and engineering analysis in order to design novel unmanned aerial vehicles. Over the course of my year in the lab I took over the project of an absent PhD student, working directly with Dr. Lentink to design an experimental procedure to collect data for a publication on the mechanical role that feathers play in allowing a bird to maneuver. The publication was accepted into Science in January 2020
My work focused on designing experimental hardware and procedures to quantify the adhesive forces acting between feathers during flight. This meant creating a system that could move bird feathers in a biologically accurate manner, while also measuring the motion and resulting forces created. To achieve this I developed a system to simultaneously track the position and forces acting on a test specimen, using Qualisys motion capture technology and a 6-axis force/torque sensor measured via LabVIEW. I also designed and machined multiple hardware components and automated data collection and processing with MATLAB scripts. My research over the summer fundamentally changed the lab's understanding of the forces responsible for this flight phenomena.
One of my larger hardware projects was the construction of a device that could rotate a test specimen repeatably while applying constant lateral force to it. The lab needed the option to constrain either moment or velocity of the rotation, so I designed the system so the drive shaft could easily switch between being powered by a weighted pulley or a servo motor. I built the assembly from a combination of machined and 3D printed parts as well as prefabricated pulleys and bearings.
Motion capture and force sensor setup
Sketches of mount to connect force sensor and test specimen
Built assembly of device's first iteration
CAD of device's second iteration
Calculations for change in moment of early design as it rotates
Sketch of second iteration