Dr Seldin's Helices

The other day, Edward Seldin paid a lunch-break visit to our robotics lab. Dr Seldin is an oral surgeon and a mechanical engineer. In his spare time, he creates artistic renditions of platonic solids out of coat-hanger wire bent into helices with machines that are also his own creations. "This is what happens when I'm allowed to go on vacation," said he demonstrating his ever increasingly complex constructions.

Why didn't I take pictures?

In any case, I was witnessing the conceptual infusion of art (its medium, the helix) into the more conventionally scientific minds of students... I could almost feel them thinking: hang on, that's a really rigid connection... if you actuate these joints, you can create a modular robot (each module made of helices) with a fundamentally different geometry... maybe we should do that...

I'm going off on a real tangent here, but the mathematical thinking behind the art project (which admittedly has very little to do with computation) made its way back into the computational robotics lab bearing the gift of inspiration for a new mechanism.