Biomechanics, Robotics, and Dynamics (BRD) Laboratory

News

Research

Kinesin Intracellular Transport

Multiscale Modeling and Simulation
Sina Albaruni, Manoochehr Rabiei

There are many systems that involve dynamic behavior occurring at different time scales, or involve fast and slow dynamics. This means that portions of the system may move quickly, the high frequency vibrations of atoms for example, and other portions may move slowly, such as the gross motion of the objects composed of those atoms. These fast and slow dynamics are often caused by some disproportionality in the system. This can include a disproportionate physical size of objects, mass of different objects, and/or size of inertia and active forces acting on the system. This often occurs for systems at very small length scales, particularly the nanoscale. These systems include the motor protein shown at the left, and many other biological systems funcitioning at the cellular level. We are examining new methods of achieving fast dynamic simulation of multiscale systems.

Bouncing Bicycle

Hybrid Dynamic Simulation
Maruf Morshed

In hybrid dynamic simulation, discrete and continuous events are combined in order to predict a system's motion. Currently this work focuses on the simulation of simultaneous impact and contact while considering energy consistency and Coulomb friction. Many different types of systems experiencing discrete events can be modeled using this approach. One of the applications for this project is analysis of simultaneous impact and contact in agile locomotion.

Smart Hospital Bed

Hard and Soft Manipulation

This project examines hard and soft manipulation including systems that use both. The terms "hard" and "soft" refer to the rigidity of the surface used to manipulate an object. The object in this study is the human body, and the goal is to manipulate the size and duration of contact forces acting on the skin in order to prevent the formation of pressure ulcers. The outcome will be a prototype bed that can achieve a desired time history of pressure distribution across the body.

The latest hexapod.

Design of Agile Legged Robots

This project involves the development of new design methodologies for producing agile legged locomotion systems. Legged systems utilize contact and impact forces in order to locomote through the environment. One goal of this work is to develop a performance analysis which includes these forces and tells how well a legged system can utilize ground contact to accelerate itself. This analysis will form the basis for new design methodologies. A key element in this type of performance-based design is that the performance is described in terms of functions which are nonlinear in the variables of interest particularly configuration variables. Statistical optimization techniques are being explored which can address these nonlinearities allowing one to quantify performance over the robot's workspace without exhaustive sampling of the configuration space.

Zeno by Hanson Robokind

Motion Control for Agile Legged Robots

This project involves the development of methodologies for autonomously producing stable periodic and nonperiodic motions for legged robots. The periodic motions are often referred to as gait motions while the aperiodic motions are referred to as agile motions. In both cases, the goal is to generate these motions autonomously without the use of motion primitives or any other predefined motions. The effort is to identify general motion principles for legged locomotion, from examination of the equations of motion, upon which a control algorithm can be based. This work also involves studying the integration and fusion of sensor information in order to provide adequate feedback to the control for producing stable locomotion.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fibroblast.jpg
Mouse Embryo Fibroblast

Cell Modeling and Simulation
Ankit Adhikari, Sina Albaruni, Manoochehr Rabiei

This project involves the modeling of cellular and subcellular processes to obtain a mechanical model of an entire cell. We have examined many cell types, including fibroblasts, but are currently examining stem cells and hope to examine brain cells in the future. Developments in this area are facilitated by our high speed computational methods based on the method of multiple scales.

Two-DOF Robot Arm

Robotic Manipulator Design and Control

Here robotic manipulator dynamics are studied. This mainly involves characterizing the force and acceleration capabilities of robotic manipulators. These capabilities refer to a manipulator's ability to accelerate its end-effector and to apply forces to the environment at the end-effector. These abilities determine a mechanism's ability to manipulate grasped and non-grasped objects. Performance measures and design methodologies based on this characterization are also developed.

Cable-Driven Leg.

Modeling and Analysis of Flexible Systems
Maruf Morshed

In this work, we explore dynamic modeling of flexible objects and surfaces and their interaction with the environment. This work includes cable-driven robotic manipulators along with other general flexible surfaces. We are particularly interested in the contact and impact problem involving flexible surfaces considering large deformations.

People

Faculty
	Alan Bowling	bowling@uta.edu
Graduate Research Assistants
	Ankit Adhikari	axa2399@mavs.uta.edu	PhD ME
	Md Abu Sina Ibne Albaruni	mxa6364@mavs.uta.edu	PhD ME
	Abu Hena Md Maruf Morshed	axm5737@mavs.uta.edu	PhD ME
Affiliates
	Manoochehr Rabiei	manoochehr.rabiei@mavs.uta.edu	PhD ME'24

The links to personal web pages are provided as a courtesy to lab members. Any opinions expressed on a personal page are solely those of its author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other lab member, including faculty.

Alumni

8/3/26-Group dinner at Chili's, Arlington, Texas. Lab Members LtoR: Zion Akpa, Ankit Adhikari, Alan Bowling, Amit Yadav, Sina Albaruni, Maruf Morshed.

8/15/25-Group dinner at Mariano's, Arlington, Texas. Lab Members LtoR: Sina Albaruni, Manoochehr Rabei, Ankit Adhikari, Alan Bowling, Maruf Morshed.

8/1/24-Group dinner at Mariano's, Arlington, Texas. Lab Members LtoR: Maruf Morshed, Alan Bowling, Manoochehr Rabei, Sina Albaruni, Kasey Villareal.

8/31/23-Group dinner at Mariano's, Arlington, Texas. LtoR: Maruf Morshed, Manoochehr Rabei, Sina Albaruni, Alan Bowling, Vatsal Joshi.

8/31/22-Group dinner at Mariano's, Arlington, Texas. LtoR: Cristian Almendariz, Alan Bowling, Aaron Gieder, Vatsal Joshi, Manoochehr Rabei.

9/9/21-Group dinner at Mariano's, Arlington, Texas. LtoR: Cristian Almendariz, Kangji Huang, Alan Bowling, Vatsal Joshi, Manoochehr Rabei.

8/8/19-Group dinner at Mariano's, Arlington, Texas. LtoR: Ashley Chase Guy, Khai Nguyen, Manoochehr Rabei, Abhishek Chatterjee, Vatsal Joshi, Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani, Kangji Huang, Alan Bowling, Cristian Almendariz, Joshua Ferrigno.

8/10/18-Group dinner at Mariano's, Arlington, Texas. LtoR: Ashley Chase Guy, Vatsal Joshi, Abhishek Chatterjee, Alan Bowling, Rashi Jain, Regan Kubicek, Manoochehr Rabei, Eric Havenhill, Jariana Musgrove.

8/18/17-Group dinner at BJ's Brewhouse, Arlington, Texas. LtoR: Ashley Chase Guy, Vatsal Joshi, Brian Bray, Abhishek Chatterjee, Alan Bowling, Gurashish Singh, Iretomiwa (Tomi) Esho, Regan Kubicek.

10/6/16-Group dinner at Prince Lebanese, Arlington, Texas. LtoR: Alan Bowling, Abhishek Chatterjee, Ashley Chase Guy.

8/24/15-Group dinner at Chili's in Arlington, Texas. LtoR: Pranav Parikh, Abhishek Chatterjee, Alan Bowling, Ashley Chase Guy, Darpan Pol, Nachiket Kansara.

8/12/14-Group dinner at Chili's in Arlington, Texas. LtoR: A. Chase Guy, Abhishek Chatterjee, Pranav Parikh, Rohit Katti, Alan Bowling, Amit Kumbhar, Nachiket Kansara, Yatish Nagaraj.

5/6/14-Group dinner at BJ's in Arlington, Texas. LtoR: Rohit Katti, Nachiket Kansara, Abhishek Chatterjee, Adrian Rodriguez, Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani, Blesson Isaac, Alan Bowling, Pranav Parikh, Yatish Nagaraj, A. Chase Guy.

8/29/13-Group dinner at Chili's in Arlington, Texas. LtoR, Back: Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani, Alan Bowling. Front: Chase Guy, Blesson Isaac, Anudeep Palanki, Shamali Vardhmane, Adrian Rodriguez, Sarvenaz Ghaffari.

8/14/12-Group dinner at Chili's in Arlington, Texas. LtoR, Back: Alan Bowling, Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani, Zachary Brush. Middle: Parvati Aruna Kandala, Adrian Rodriguez. Front: Anudeep Palanki, Nguyen Tran.

8/7/11-Group dinner at Pappadeaux in Arlington, Texas. LtoR, Back: Alan Bowling, Middle: Daniel Montrallo Flickinger, Adrian Rodriguez, Tapas Dey, Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani, James Drake, Front: Parvati Aruna Kandala.

8/24/10-Group dinner at Pappadeaux in Arlington, Texas. LtoR, Back: Drew Morgan, Middle: Parvati Aruna Kandala, Nesreen Alsmadi, Daniel Montrallo Flickinger, Alan Bowling, Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani, Front: Michael Tadros, Adrian Rodriguez, Srider Thirupachoor Comerica.

7/25/09-Group dinner at Pappadeaux in Arlington, Texas. LtoR, Shih-Chein (George) Teng, Alan Bowling, Daniel Montrallo Flickinger, Oriana Flickinger (Honorary), Ryan Robertson, Salvador (Chava) Jimenez.

7/16/09-Entertainment at banquet dinner, AIM'09 in Singapore.

Activities

	Texas Rover Team Students design and build a mars rover which they teleoperate from a remotely located base station. We compete in the University Rover Challenge held at the Mars Desert Research Station in Hanksville, Utah usually around the end of May. This is a fun and exciting competition. Learn more about it at URC.
	Rover Team LtoR: Jason Cabrejos, Katarina Nguyen, Hunter Smith, Jorge Levario, Jaden Ngo, Benjamin Knight, Matthew Koithan, Logan Hutton, Christian Tindula, Paul Park, Oscar Alvarez, Alan Bowling, Caitlin Mosley	2017 Rover Team LtoR: Front: Stefan Mancillas, Yobani Martinez, Oskar Zaldivar, Henry Nguyen. Back: Josh Adams, Cyril Lutterodt, Alan Bowling, Christian Hoermann, Marcus Brewer, Ivan Leontiev, Cole Maas, Robert Ritter, Syed (Shaad) Jaffrey	2015 Rover Team LtoR: Isaih McNeil, Syed (Shaad) Jaffrey, Erin Smith, Henry Nguyen, Stefan Mancillas, Amir Murad, Eyad Shihabeddin, Kersasp Cawasji

Support
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last updated July 28, 2026