Cell Plasticity in Wound Healing

A study of shape change of cells in epithelial wound healing using computational a model.

Computational Optimization of Soft Robots in Sofa

A project focused on the joint design and control of soft robots using the Sofa Framework to simulate them.

Duckietown + Duckiesky

Duckietown is a robotics education and research platform. I work to support Duckiesky which is bringing drones to Duckietown and public high schools in Rhode Island.

Soft Beam Climbing Robot

I designed and built a beam climbing soft robot that required only a single constant pressure input to locomote.
Project Page

Tomography Segmentation and Fitting

I developed an algorithm to segment and fit the location and orientation of lens shaped particles in 3D volume data.

Contact Distributions

Using a physically justified method I analyzed the particle contact distributions for lens particles as part of a paper about sources of shear strength.

Tomography segmentation and fitting

X-ray tomography reconstruction can give us an excellent view of the mechanical structures within 3D granular packings. Due to the complexities inherent in systems of thousands of particles, granular media remains very difficult to model. At the Jaeger Lab, I developed a method to segment and fit the locations and orientations of convex grains from 3D tomography data. Access to grain by grain position and orientation enabled me to analyze both local and global structures and patterns within packings. Gif created by Kieran Murphy.

Segmentation and fitting code is available on GitHub.

Contact Distributions On Lens Particles

The shape and surface properties of a granular material determine the response of that material under shear. Using the segmentation method described above, I analyzed patterns in alignment within the bulk of packings as well as the particles’ contact distribution using a physically justified metric. Working with other lab members, I used this analysis to study how particle shape affects wear over time, which in turn affects a packing’s response to shear. This work was published in a paper I co-authored in Granular Matter.

To this work, I contributed the tomography segmentation and fitting software as well as the analysis for the physically justified contacts for lens shaped particles.

The paper can be found at doi.org/10.1007/s10035-019-0913-7.

Publications and Projects

Journal Papers

  1. The intertwined roles of particle shape and surface roughness in controlling the shear strength of a granular material [DOI] [PDF]
    Kieran A. Murphy, Arthur K. MacKeith, Leah K. Roth, and Heinrich M. Jaeger. Granular Matter. 2019.
  2. A Buckling-Sheet Ring Oscillator for Autonomous Locomotion [DOI] [PDF]
    Won-Kyu Lee, Daniel J. Preston, Markus P. Nemitz, Amit Nagarkar, Arthur K. MacKeith, Benjamin Gorissen, Nikolas Vasios, Vanessa Sanchez, Katia Bertoldi, L. Mahadevan, and George M. Whitesides. Science Robotics. 2022.
  3. Mechanical Plasticity of Cell Membranes Enhances Epithelial Wound Closure [DOI] [PDF] [Supplement]
    Andrew T. Ton, Arthur K. MacKeith, Mark D. Shattuck, and Corey S. O'Hern. Physical Review Research. 2024.

Talks

  1. Modeling and Analysis of Mesophyll Tissue Development in Leaves and Flowers Across Species [Abstract]
    Arthur K. MacKeith, Allison E. Culbert, John D. Treado, Adam B. Roddy, Craig Brodersen, Mark D. Shattuck, and Corey S. O'Hern. American Physical Society March Meeting. 2023.

Posters

  1. Structure in Cylindrical Packings of Convex Particles [PDF]
    Arthur K. MacKeith, Kieran A. Murphy, and Heinrich M. Jaeger. University of Chicago Undergraduate Research Symposium. 2019.
  2. Beam-Climbing Robot Controlled by a Soft Ring Oscillator [PDF]
    Arthur K. MacKeith, Won-Kyu Lee, and George M. Whitesides. Harvard University Campus Wide Poster Session. 2019.
  3. Modeling Mesophyll with Deformable Particles
    Allison Culbert*, Arthur K. MacKeith*, John D. Treado, Mark D. Shattuck, and Corey S. O'Hern. University of Massachusetts Amherst Summer School on Soft Solids and Complex Fluids. 2022.
  4. Modeling and Analysis of Mesophyll Tissue Development
    Arthur K. MacKeith, Allison E. Culbert, Joy Pajarla, Jeroen Schreel, John D. Treado, Adam B. Roddy, Mark D. Shattuck, and Corey S. O'Hern. Yale Biophysics Symposium. 2023.

Coding Projects

  1. Tomography Segmentation and Fitting Library [About] [GitHub Link]
  2. Docker Container: Sofa Framework for Soft Robotics [GitHub Link]

Outreach

Duckietown + Duckiesky

Duckietown is a platform for both education and research. The organization provides low cost robots and open source learning materials to students across the globe, from high schools students new to programming to graduate AI researchers.

DuckieSky is a new initiative lead by Professor Stephanie Tellex at Brown that is bringing drones into Duckietown and bringing Duckietown to high school students.

My contributions to Duckietown are on DuckieSky, where I have developed the drone control stack. I refactored the drone’s control stack to integrate it with Docker and the existing Duckietown communication and management framework. This drone is now being used to educate high school students in an effort to make robotics and STEM more accessible.

In 2020 refactored the control stack, migrating from python 2 to 3, to be rolled out in conjunction with the next generation of Duckiesky hardware.

Other outreach

Physics with a Bang! Holiday lecture and open house.