Projects
Angular Momentum in Turning and Rapid Starts(September 2007 - May 2009)
Masters Research: T. ransients occur in human walking during a transition to, from, and between steady state walking and acts as an impulse destabilizing a gait cycle. Turns and accelerated starts are all common transients encountered and managed intelligently by humans everyday. As the population of elderly increases understanding balance control in healthy subjects becomes more important. Technologically, humanoid bipeds are rapidly becoming a more common part of our everyday life. Therefore, they must also be able to navigate our environments adroitly if they are to assist us in our daily living. This thesis takes biomechanical principals of angular momentum and applies them to healthy subjects in an e ort to elucidate human balance control strategies. Each transient task is unique and despite large segmental contributions to whole-body angular momentum during movement the whole-body angular momentum remains tightly regulated. A analysis of segmental contributions to the principal components explaining more than 90% makes clear the balance control strategy used by healthy humans.
A System for Recognition of Affect in Autism (Spring 2008)
People with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) face a number of different challenges. These include social, emotional and physical challenges. Each challenge expresses itself differently in each person on the spectrum and the exhibited severity varies greatly from each person. The particular interest of this work is to understand some of the diversity of motor disorders occurring with people on the spectrum and develop technologies to promote more independent living by people on the Autistic Spectrum.
Control of the Compass Gait Biped via Weight Perturbation (Spring 2008)
The Compass Gait is a simplified model of biped walking. It has been shown there exist stable limit cycles for the passive dynamic walker. To increase the size of the basin of attraction it is possible to provide control at the hip and ankles, and design other energy shaping control to adjust speed and stability of the walker. In this paper I implement two controllers discovered by Goswami, et. al. that enlarge the basin of attraction to control a biped. Further, I go on to implement a Weight Perturbation algorithm to maximize the size of the basin of attraction for a small part of state space by optimizing the gains on the hip controller provided by Goswami.
Mechatonics and Prompt-Assisted Typing (2008 - current)
Serveral different metholodologies have been developed to detect the onset of physical movement disorders in the past. Most research has thus far focued on detecting the onset of epileptic seizures. However, these ideas can be fruitfully applied to movement disorders in autism. This project aims to develop a wearable-device that detects the onset of muscular disfunction during the targetted tast of typing, and attempts to alieviate the discordination by providing vibractile feedback to the skin to relax muscles at an important point.
Stock Price Prediction using Gaussian Process Regression (2007)
Publications
M. Farrell, H. Herr, Angular Momentum Primitives for Human Turning: Control Implications for Biped Robots, IEEE - Humanoids Conference, December 2008
E.Martinez-Villalpando, H. Herr, M. Farrell
"Estimation of Ground Reaction Force and Zero Moment Point on a Powered Ankle-Foot Prosthesis", IEEE-EMBS Annual International Conference, 2007
M. Farrell, I. Masaki, B. Horn, "Vision Based System for Occupancy and Posture Analysis", MTL Annual Research Report, 2006
M. Farrell, "Theory of Theta-Schottky Groups and Their Fractal Dimensions", Thesis, Bard College at Simon's Rock, 2004
M. Farrell, "Solution to the Linked Circles Puzzle using Hopf Fibration", Bard College at Simon's Rock, 2004 (unpublished)
Coursework
MIT Graduate Courses:
Spring 2009: Statistical Learning Theory and Applications (9.520)
Fall 2008: Time Series Analysis and System Identification (2.687)
Spring 2008: Affective Computing(MAS.630), Underactuated Robotics(6.832)
Fall 2007: Optimization Methods(6.255), Machine Learning(6.867)
Spring 2006: Advanced Computational Imaging(6.881)
Fall 2005: Machine Vision(6.866)
Spring 2005: Advanced Partial Differential Equations (18.306)
Bard College at Simon's Rock: Real Analysis, Complex Analysis, Abstract Algebra, Fractal Geometry, Morse Theory, Discrete Geometric Group Theory, Topology, Knot Theory, Analytic Number Theory, Differential Geometry, Quantum Mechanics, Classical Mechanics