Browsing by Subject "UROP"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Aryne Aminohalogenation
    (2023-07-26) Anderson, Lars, W.
    This UROP project is a portion of a larger aryne aminohalogenation project, which I started Spring semester 2023, and plan on continuing into Fall semester 2023. I’m lucky to work in the Roberts group, which specializes in organometallic and catalytic chemistry, under the mentorship of a fourth year graduate student, Josh Gavin. Our collaborative research project studies a reaction method in which two functional groups are added to an aryne, a highly reactive intermediate molecule (figure 1). Achieving synthetically useful difunctionalization (as opposed to a reaction adding only a single function group) is an appealing prospect, especially in the fields like medicinal chemistry where large quantities of the target molecule need to be made; at such a scale additional steps are costly and increasingly difficult
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    Assessing the Effectiveness of Biomass Harvesting at Reducing Phosphorus Loss in Wetland Mesocosms (UROP)
    (2021-01) Gregersen, Lucy
    This undergraduate research project assessed how phosphorus levels in student-designed mesocosms in Saint Paul have changed in the span of two years since experimentation on the effectiveness of biomass harvesting. Throughout 2017 and 2018, each mesocosm tank was maintained regularly with 3.75 gallons of water containing 0.06mg/L of phosphorus, and plants were harvested seasonally to assess how much phosphorus can be removed by each species. Soil and plant samples taken in summer and fall of 2020 indicate that soil phosphorus levels increased without fertilizer application and plant harvesting, and phosphorus contained in the plant matter decreased.
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    Characterizing Performance and Errors of Coarse Sun Sensors
    (2017-12) Saborio, Ricardo J
    This presentation focuses on outlining the experimental setup and results for the characterization of Coarse Sun Sensor performance for in-orbit attitude determination in small satellites. Coarse Sun Sensors provide an inexpensive alternative to the more commonly used Fine Sun Sensors in the aerospace industry. These sensors are a fraction of the cost ($1.50 vs $3500 per unit) of the space grade sun sensors in regular satellites and, based on the results obtained in this work, the sensors themselves prove to be relatively effective at measuring the incoming sun vector. The work done in this Undergraduate Research Opportunity (UROP) is intended to serve as a stepping-stone for the development of an inexpensive sun-sensor packet for the University of Minnesota small satellite research group’s payloads. These payloads require accurate pointing at the sun while in orbit and thus such a sensor packet would be key to mission success.
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    An Empirical Study of Communication-Free Coordination in Human-Robot Teams Through a Coverage Control Game
    (2020-05) Kuan, Jin Hong; Yazıcıoğlu, A. Yasin; Aksaray, Derya
    We investigate the performance in coverage control problems, where some robots are controlled by human operators and there are no explicit communications among the robots for coordination. One example of such a scenario is a team of unmanned and manned vehicles together pursuing a surveillance mission, where each vehicle operates based on local observations without communicating with others due to physical or strategic limitations. For such scenarios, there exist distributed algorithms that ensure (near-) optimal long-run average performance when followed by all robots. This paper is focused on how the team performance changes when some robots are controlled by human operators rather than following such an optimal algorithm. For the empirical analysis, we have designed a multi-player computer game, where each player (human operator) controls a single robot and the autonomous robots follow a noisy greedy algorithm to optimize their marginal contribution to the overall coverage. We present the results obtained on multiple maps with a team of four robots, where the number of players range from zero (all robots are autonomous) to four (each robot is controlled by a player). Our results indicate that long-run average performance degrades with the introduction of human players, but this effect is not always monotonous with respect to the number of human players. Furthermore, through post-test questionnaires we showed that performance is a good predictor of the outcome in human subjective assessments. On the other hand, the number of human players in a team was not found to have any significant effect on subjective assessment.
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    Image Navigation UROP Research
    (2014-07-23) VandenAvond, Sean
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    Vachellia Collinsii: Assessing the Below-Ground Dynamics in an Ant-Plant Relationship (UROP)
    (2024-07-30) Liberman, Katrina
    The mutualistic interaction between the bullhorn acacia (Vachellia collinsii) and its resident ants (Pseudomyrmex) is well-documented for its above-ground dynamics, where the plant provides food and shelter to the ants in exchange for protection and vegetation clearance. This study explores the under-studied below-ground impacts of this mutualism, hypothesizing that the ants’ above-ground clearing activities affect fine root mass beneath V. collinsii canopies. Conducted in June 2024 at Estacion Experimental Horizontes in the tropical dry forest of northwestern Costa Rica, this study compares fine root mass within V. collinsii clearings to that in adjacent control sites without V. collinsii. Fine root samples were collected from six cores per site in ten experimental sites. Statistical analyses revealed no significant difference in fine root mass between V. collinsii and control sites (p = 0.246). However, a significant positive relationship was found between clearing size and the difference in root mass (R² = 0.64, p = 0.013), suggesting that larger clearings are associated with greater differences in fine root mass. These results indicate that while V. collinsii clearings do impact below-ground dynamics, the effects are more pronounced with larger clearing sizes.