Blog Post
Congratulations, Ben Warmington! TakeAim Runner-Up 2020
BRL • Mar 11, 2021
We are delighted to announce that BRL based PhD student, Ben Warmington, is a runner-up at the national Smith Institute’s annual TakeAIM competition.
The TakeAIM competition is an opportunity for university students to showcase their work on the industrial stage. TakeAIM’s goal is to highlight the crucial role mathematics plays in solving real-world problems while rewarding the academic exploration of future innovators who undertake pioneering research.
Ben, a University of Bristol PhD student, wrote about a piece of research he is directly involved in carrying out, identifying opportunities that may be realised by its application and possible future benefits in both economic and social terms. The entry, "Taking inspiration from nature's smallest machines to inspire better robotics", focussed on his work attempting to model and subsequently leverage the inherent adaptive and organisational qualities of molecular motors to produce simpler and smarter actuators.
Extract:
How do animals perform such a variety of complicated motions so well, when our robots are so inflexible? If you asked most people this they may say it's something to do with the brain, and this is certainly part of the answer, but brainless organisms can achieve similar movements! Indeed, even our brain isn’t powerful enough to control every process happening within us – a vast amount of simple control must be passed off to tiny ‘molecular motors’, the basis for all our movement.
There are hundreds of thousands of independent molecular motor units in a single muscle cell! Like rowers in a boat they work together to allow us to move and adapt, making decisions with little to no input from the brain....
