BE 107, Spring 2016

BE 107: Exploring Biological Principles Through Bio-Inspired Design
Instructors Michael Dickinson (BBE), flyman@caltech.edu Richard Murray (CDS/BE), murray@cds.caltech.edu Floris van Breugel (BE), floris@caltech.edu Lectures: MW, 11a-12p, 151 Braun Office hours: by appointment	Teaching Assistants Gautham Sholingar (EE) Arjun Sadanand (EE) Lab session: Tue, 1-4, 12 Steele Lab Open lab hours: Wed, 7-10 pm and Thu, 1-4 pm

Course Description

Students will formulate and implement an engineering project desired to explore a biological principle or property that is exhibited in nature. Students will work in small teams in which they build a hardware platform that is motivated by a biological example in which a given approach or architecture is used to implement a given behavior. Alternatively, the team will construct new experimental instruments in order to test for the presence of an engineering principle in a biological system. Example topics include bio-inspired control of motion (from bacteria to insects), processing of sensory information (molecules to neurons), and robustness/fault-tolerance. Each project will involve proposing a specific mechanism to be explored, designing an engineering system that can be used to demonstrate and evaluate the mechanism, and building a computer-controlled, electro-mechanical system in the lab that implements or characterizes the proposed mechanism, behavior or architecture.

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