For Ran Dai, assistant professor and Black and Veatch Faculty Fellow in aerospace engineering, the choice of her profession was simple: she was good at mathematics, good at problem solving and knew she wanted to take those skills and apply them to the real world.

And now she is.

Dai, who is earning a five-year $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, began research a little more than a year ago on self-sufficient, power-managing, solar-powered robots.

She hopes her current research, inspired by her work while she was a fellow, will allow a robot to be able to identify its surrounding environment and be able to better adjust its positioning to be able to permanently work outside for long durations of time by charging automatically.

“I got inspired by this idea when I worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington. In that job, I was responsible to develop a power-management system for 787 Boeing aircraft, the most fuel-efficient aircraft in the world,” Dai said.

Dai further begged the next question as a baseline that created the research she is conducting today.

“If we have nuclear power supply in a robotics system, which can be worked on the ground or in the air, how can we allocate the nuclear power to different electrical units and make a robotic system operate longer and have a longer endurance?” Dai asked.

Kishan Patel, senior in aerospace engineering, has been working with Dai for the past two years on the solar-powered robots.

The robots, which don’t exactly fall in line with Patel’s path of study, originally started as something to put on his résumé, but the more he worked on the project, the more interested he became.

These solar-power robots, as outlined by Patel, should accomplish the “Three D’s once they are completed.”

“Dull, dirty and dangerous,” Patel said.

Patel further explained what each ‘D’ stands for. He said dull means the robots could go for long durations, they could monitor the environment and they could do surveillance.

Dirty means sending robots or rovers into places humans shouldn’t go, such as radioactive zones. Dangerous means be sending robots or rovers into natural disaster zones or war zones.

Because of the solar-powered technology research Dai and her team are conducting, these robots will have the characteristics of the “Three D’s,” and subsequently need no human-interaction to tell them what to do, where to go or when or how to recharge. These robots, by the end, should be completely self-sufficient.

The motivation, as stated on a poster created by Dai’s team in the lab reads, “We seek to minimize the travel time of a solar-powered unmanned ground vehicle through an area with negligible net energy loss.”

Dai’s team consists of graduate students Adam Kaplan and Chuangchuang Sun along with undergraduate assistants Nathaniel Kingry, Patel and Justin Van Den Top.

The team is currently heading its third generation of the land robot and hopes to move its research outdoors. The ultimate goal would be to have air and ground robots that can work together to, for example, have the air robot notify the ground robot of any obstacles in its path.

“In the future, we will house solar-powered [unmanned aerial vehicles] and hope that [the air and ground robots] will work in a collaborating way,” Dai said. “The solar-powered UAVs have a wide field of view and they can predict the power, I will say the solar radiation in a larger area, and they will guide the ground robot and make the robot work more efficiently.”

This technology is the forefront of an entire new field. Patel said when they first started the project and looked to see if anyone else was researching the same technologies, not a lot of results showed up.

These self-sufficient, solar-powered robots should eventually be able to carry algorithms, microcontrollers, solar panels, wireless connections, voltage current sensors, GPS technology and cameras, according to the team.

They will also be able to map solar density, manage power supplies and best plan for maximum efficiency, the team said in a news release last week.