Rooms with a View

Taking a stroll down the hallways of the Engineering Building’s first level—dubbed the “innovation floor”—visitors are sure to get an eyeful.

In one corner a 10-foot-square window invites gawking at real-time drone research. With the agility of hummingbirds, BYU-programmed crafts flit up, back, side to side—each movement triangulated to the millimeter by a halo of ceiling-mounted infrared cameras. BYU researchers have trained their quadcopters to deftly—and autonomously—navigate obstacles using a simple camera, no need for GPS or other high-tech sensors. The research is good for unmanned aerial vehicles when GPS is spotty or jammed. And it’s good for spectators, be they grad students watching from computers behind protective glass or youth groups on tour.

Doctoral student James S. Jackson (BS ’15) says the new visibility is fun, if a little nerve-racking. “We are flying prototype code, and sometimes it doesn’t behave as we expect”—which is to say, the drones crash.

Engineering professors Randal W. Beard and Timothy W. McLain (BS ’86, MS ’87) have been perfecting these moves in the Multiple Agent Intelligent Coordination and Control (MAGICC) Lab for years, but their Fletcher Building flight space—one-third the height of the new room—cramped their style and messed with air-flow patterns. The new space is letting them spread their wings—or, rather, quadcopter blades.

From long-armed robot “King Louie” (above) to BYU’s long-enduring supermileage vehicle (below), BYU engineering projects now have ample space for testing and tweaking.

One door down the hallway King Louie flexes his long arms and Kaa writhes from the rafters. But don’t be fooled—these robots, named after Jungle Book bad guys, are air-filled, fabric-encased softies. With NASA funding, BYU mechanical-engineering professor Marc D. Killpack (BS ’07) and his students are giving these robotic arms a lighter touch—meaning one that “won’t punch a hole through the side of the spaceship,” says grad student Phillip E. Hyatt (BS ’16).

He calls their new home “way bigger than our old space,” which was an obscure, one-windowed basement room in the Fletcher Building. That site could accommodate only one of the lab’s robots at a time, and when the researchers wanted to hang 6-footer Kaa from the ceiling, they had to knock out tiles for more height. Now all six of the lab’s bots can be set up at once, with robotic-arm elbow room to spare.

To help Louie, Kaa, and their ilk sense their environment, team “sewboticists” stitch tactile pixels into cloth every centimeter to create a touch-sensitive “skin.” It’s a novel BYU approach, and its creation is on display for viewers. “It’s fun,” says Hyatt, “because . . . people look in here and then they smile because we have cool stuff.”

More cool stuff is visible just down the hall, where people can observe BYU Racing student teams improving upon their supermileage vehicle’s 1,985 mpg, prepping their off-road vehicle for the next race, or adding features to their Mars concept rover. The competitive spirit of these teams is reflected in a black-and-white checkered pattern painted on the floor.

We hope that we’ll be known as the place for innovation and creativity. —Jim Trent

The design of the whole first floor—from the exposed ceilings to a less-polished finish on the furnishings to the garage-style doors (see-through, of course) for the labs—is distinctly industrial. And that’s intentional, says Trent, meant to shout out that this is a creative place where you can roll up your sleeves and build stuff.

Indeed, the large prototyping lab on the floor—with laser and water cutters, machining tools, 3-D printers, you name it—makes it possible to build components for labs, student capstone projects, or other urgent needs. Like the time one of Killpack’s robots broke its wrist and needed a replacement arm—$30,000 from the supplier. Instead, the team walked across the hall and built a new part for about $5.

Faculty, student teams, and clubs can reserve additional spaces, from project bays to group project rooms where students can shepherd concepts from early diagrams to fully realized prototypes.

The whole floor has one purpose, says Trent: for students and faculty to “be creative and use this maker space. We hope that we’ll be known as the place for innovation and creativity.”