ECE Student Wins Graduate Student Research Symposium

ECE Ph.D. student Tahmid Latif won first place in the Engineering division at the 2014 NC State Graduate Student Research Symposium for his poster “Terrestrial Insect Biobots for Search and Rescue after Natural Disasters.”

ECE Ph.D. student Tahmid Latif won first place in the Engineering division at the 2014 NC State Graduate Student Research Symposium for his poster “Terrestrial Insect Biobots for Search and Rescue after Natural Disasters.” 

Tahmid, a member of the iBionics Lab led by Dr. Alper Bozkurt, describes his research as “the use of crawling insects, such as the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, as instrumented biobots in search and rescue missions after natural disasters – they have the ability to efficiently navigate in unknown and dynamic environments.” Tahmid continued, “Current research involves equipping backpacks with an array of microphones to pinpoint help calls from surviving natural disaster victims, and automatically navigate a biobot to the location. These biobots form the nodes of a Zigbee-based sensor network to efficiently transmit the data to the first responders for monitoring and subsequent analysis as needed.”

The Ninth Annual NC State University Graduate Student Research Symposium showcased the outstanding quality and diversity of graduate-level research at NC State and provided students with the opportunity to practice their communication skills with those outside of their discipline. The symposium is also designed to demonstrate the importance of graduate level research to state decision-makers.