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John Pohl, ARI professor, (right) discusses his research with a guest at the Research Expo.
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Manisa
Pipattanasomporn, PhD candidate, displays her research poster at the Research Expo.
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ARI Hosts Open House for the City of Alexandria's "Tech Week"
Virginia Tech’s Alexandria Research Institute (ARI) participated in the “Eighth Annual Alexandria Technology Achievement Week” sponsored by the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership (AEDP) by hosting an open house Wednesday, March 17, 2004.
“The open house provided an opportunity for the public to see how Virginia Tech is bringing technical resources to benefit high tech business in Alexandria,” said Saifur Rahman, ARI director and professor.
The event showcased ARI’s engineering research and capabilities to assist local high-tech businesses.
Demonstrations of wireless networking technology and of renewable energy technologies for mobile sensor networks from the Sustainably Energized, Adaptive, Biomimetic, Oceanic and Terrestrial Swarms (SEABOTS) project were given.
The wireless networking demonstration highlighted a basic wireless adhoc network that involves multi-hop communication between nodes in a network. Nodes in a wireless ad hoc network act as individual entities routing packets for each other. The demonstration showed the consequence of a node dropping out, which resulted in a break of communication. For more information about this project, please contact,
Luiz DaSilva, ARI assistant professor.
The second demonstration, concerning the SEABOTS program, showed how the movement of waves in the ocean (in this simulation a water pump) could rotate a turbine, which can create electricity.
SEABOTS is working to develop swarms of petite robots to monitor natural environments in unobtrusive ways.
“Each (ro)bot would collect data in an undisturbed setting, just as though it naturally belonged there,”
said George Hagerman, an ARI researcher who helped develop the SEABOTS concept. “Consider the mapping of groundwater contamination, for instance. Digging wells to sample groundwater is costly and disturbs the soil and local water table, whereas a swarm of ‘seed-pod bots’ scattered over the landscape, with fiber optic rootlets to measure the concentration of dissolved chemicals could obtain more truly representative data over a much wider area, for a fraction of the cost.”
For more information about SEABOTS, please contact George Hagerman.
The event also brought information about bio-technological advances such as breast cancer research and diabetes awareness.
For more information about ARI or the “Eighth Annual Alexandria Technology Achievement Week,” please visit
www.ari.vt.edu and www.alexchamber.com.
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