Mahsa Parsapour
Home Lab:
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, with Prof. Hamid Taghirad
Home University:
K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Iran
Visiting Lab:
Biorobotics Lab (BIOROB), with Prof. Auke Ijspeert and Dr. Kamilo Melo
Visiting University:
EPFL, Switzerland
Year of visit:
6 months in 2016
Project:
Indoor Footstep and Spine Motion Planner for Salamander Robots
1. Were you able to fulfill all your planned objectives?
What I worked on my proposal with Dr. Kamilo Melo was a little bit different from what I obtained as the output of the project. However, I think that the results are beneficial for other students to work on what we defined in the proposal.
2. Did this experience inspire/enable you to continue your career?
The experience I obtained from this internship was really great and made me sure that I have to follow doing research at the PhD level in robotics. Also, before joining BioRob I was really curious about bioinspired robotics, and this lab was a great place to start getting to know what this field really is. After finishing this internship, I continued my collaboration with Dr. Kamilo Melo, and we wrote a research paper on the results of our experiments on Pleurobot for search and rescue scenarios, and I presented the results at IROS 2017 in Vancouver, Canada. Also, we made a public repository on GitHub for Pleurobot in Gazebo environment. The PhD position I found for my future studies was mostly because of the research I did at BioRob. My background is in control and robotics. And I was interested in finding a research position with focus on control and bioinspired robotics that I finally found it thanks to the experience NCCR robotics grant provided me.
3. Did your host lab contribute to the quality of your research?
Yes, BioRob made lots of equipments and tools available for my experiments. Especially, thanks to the help of Dr. Kamilo Melo, I was able to collect lots of data for analyzing the behavior of Pleurobot in different scenarios before leaving Switzerland. After that, Dr. Kamilo Melo helped me a lot in reading and revising the paper we published at IROS 2017.
4. Do you feel your association with NCCR Robotics has had an overall impact on your studies and future career?
I feel that NCCR robotics has widen my horizon in robotics. This association with NCCR Robotics has opened lots of new opportunities for me to follow my goals internationally. I have gone to a few international events in robotics, and my network in robotics got bigger.
5. What are you currently working on and what are your plans for the future?
I am going to start my PhD at university of Waterloo in Canada for Fall 2018. My research is going to be both on control and bioinspired robotics. And I am going to work on human movement analysis.
For the future, I like to have similar experiences like what I obtained from NCCR grant and hopefully have my own research group.