Graduate student Lucy Du designs novel prosthetics and seeks to inspire others to pursue engineering.
Lucy Du, a doctoral student in the MIT Media Lab, has a remarkable passion for making. She spends her work day in lab designing and fabricating prosthetics, and devotes her free time to personal projects in the MIT MakerWorkshop or inspiring other students to try their hands at engineering. “The best feeling is when I get to go into a shop and make some parts, or order some parts — and the day they come in is like Christmas,” she says.
She also shares her love of engineering in her pursuits outside of the lab. Throughout her time here (Du also earned her undergraduate and master’s degree at MIT), she has found ways to make building things and engineering more accessible to others — from creating a student makerspace to teaching high school girls. She even turned a role on Discovery’s reality TV show “BattleBots” into an opportunity to inspire kids about engineering.
Making for prosthetics
When Du finished her master’s in mechanical engineering in 2016, she was ready to experience something outside of academia. She went on to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but after two years, she started to feel an itch to get her PhD. Even though she considered other schools, MIT stood out as an obvious choice. “MIT has so many resources and so many opportunities that you can be here for years and years and not even scratch the surface,” she says. “I think it was where I was meant to be.”
Du knew she wanted to work on animatronic robotics. Finding the right lab was not without bumps, but she ultimately ended up in the Biomechatronics Group under professor of media arts and sciences Hugh Herr. Housed within the Media Lab, it is an interdisciplinary lab broadly focused on prosthetics, exoskeletons, and the human-robot interface. She knew Herr’s lab was the right fit for her because of its emphasis on hardware design. “It is actually really hard to find robotics labs that focus on hardware building,” she notes. “A lot of robotics labs will buy the hardware for a project and focus solely on the software. I believe in designing your hardware with the end application in mind, as this can make the whole process better.”
To that end, Du’s research project focuses on designing the hardware for a robotic ankle that functions better than what is available now. “I hope the design will be able to fully mimic biological movements, including fast walking, walking up and down stairs and ramps, and some other common motions that you would make throughout a day,” she explains.
Currently, there is only one commercial powered prosthetic ankle that provides enough force for walking. But it has notable limitations, Du says. Because the design is large and bulky, “you either need to be a person of tall stature or you have to have a very short residual limb after amputation in order to wear the product.”
Her affinity for making started at a young age. “I loved building things and having tangible hardware to work on. Sitting there and coding or doing math all day was never what I wanted,” Du says. She participated in a robotics team in high school and has drawn inspiration from Disney movies and entertainment for many years, especially as their humanoid animatronic technology has grown. (Disney’s “eerily organic-looking” Spiderman stunt robot is a particular favorite of hers.)
Now, as a fourth-year PhD student, Du is channeling her passion for building things into designing a prosthetic ankle that is readily accessible to people of all sizes, since current commercial designs are only suited for tall individuals.
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