Physical Space
The SMART Lab extends two physical lab spaces on the main campus provided by Purdue University, with respective sizes of approximately 1,200 square feet and 600 square feet. One of the lab facilities, called POTR lab, is located in the Potter Engineering Center (POTR), a large open space and lab complex, which allows the use of public facilities; this is advantageous for collaboration with other research groups and hosting events for visitors and students (e.g. K-12 summer camp). This POTR lab facility has 12 workstations with desktop computers and monitors available in each workstation for researchers; a meeting table for a group meeting; assortment of electrical and mechanical tools and supplies, workbench stations, and two 3D printers for prototyping; and an indoor swimming pool for aquatic robot experiments.
The other lab facility, called HEAV lab, is located in Heavilon Hall (HEAV), just a few minutes away from the POTR lab facility. This HEAV lab facility lab has 2 workstations with desktop computers and monitors available in each workstation for researchers. This lab space can accommodate various user studies and 10-20 mobile robot experiments with a motion capture system, including ground robots and drones.
POTR Lab facility (POTR #141) [left], HEAV Lab facility (HEAV #101) [right]
Equipment
The SMART Lab's current research includes multi-robot systems, human-robot interaction, and robot design and control in the context of assistive robotics and field robotics. As such, in-house equipment ranges from interfaces, sensors, and 3D printers to robot platforms for rapid prototyping and robot experiments. Below is the featured equipment:
- Motion capture system: 13-camera Vicon's 3D motion capture system for real-time tracking 3D motion of humans and robots with sub-millimeter accuracy
- Workstations: 4 Mac mini (Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM), 2 Dell (Intel Core i7, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080), 2 Dell (Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM, GPU), 6 Dell (Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM), and 2 Dell (Intel Core i7, 8GB)
- Laptops: 2 Apple MacBook Pro, 1 Apple MacBook Air, 2 Microsoft Surface Pro 4, and 2 Dell
- Interfaces: 1 Oculus Rift virtual reality system, 4 LG G6 smartphones, 2 Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 tablet, and 1 Apple watch
- Sensors: 2 Velodyne 3D laser scanner, 2 PTZ camera, 1 Emotive EEG headset, 1 Empatica E4 wristband, 1 Shimmer3 GSR+ unit
- Workbench: Assortment of tools and supplies required for prototyping and repairs
- 3D printers: 1 LulzBot TAZ 6
- Indoor pool: Intex indoor pool, a 9'10" x 6'6" x 33" (3m x 2m x 84cm)
- Drone arena: a 16'x11'x8' (5m x 3.5m x 2.5m) with safety nets
Robots
The following commercially-available robots and in-house built robots currently exist in the SMART Lab for research:
- 5 Clearpath Jackal UGV
- 8 iRobot Create2
- 12 SparkFun RedBot
- 15 Hamster Robot
- 2 Intel Drone
- 1 DJI Phantom
- 7 Bitcraze Crazyflie
- In-house built robots including SMARTBoat 3, SMARTBoat 4, SMARTBoat 5, SMARTBoat 7, and SMARTmBOTs
