Samantha Noel

Doctor of Philosophy, (Engineering)
Study Completed: 2013
College of Sciences

Citation

Thesis Title
Cultivation and community composition analysis of plant-adherent rumen bacteria

Read article at Massey Research Online: MRO icon

In the future, it is expected that people will interact with machines much more intimately. One application is machines assisting able and disabled people to perform physical tasks. However, to date there is a lack of technologies enabling people to do so in a safe and adaptive way. Mr Noble’s work focussed on identifying aspects of biological control and actuation within the vertebrate nervous system and emulating them in the engineering domain. Key outcomes include identifying functional roles of central pattern generators and muscles, modelling and simulating them, and development of his control paradigm. Mr Noble’s work has successfully demonstrated that a combined central pattern generator controller and antagonistically-actuated pneumatic “muscles” can provide safe and adaptive human-machine interaction. His research has opened up significant opportunities for future work, such as developing his control paradigm further and extending it to multiple degrees-of-freedom assistive devices (e.g. exoskeletons).

Supervisors
Professor Jasna Rakonjac
Dr Graeme Attwood
Dr Peter Janssen