This thesis seeks to make developing multi-robot comedy performances more accessible to developers and performers, and suggests the use of duo comedy for robot-run research experiments. It involved four main steps: technology development, experimental deployments in the general public, the development of the Multi-Robot Comedy Performance System, and an analysis...
The health and environmental impacts associated with traditional methods of household cooking and heating have driven the development and dissemination of many types of improved cookstoves and fuels. However, adoption rates, household cooking practices, and even household ventilation can directly influence the magnitude of real-world impacts. Given the highly contextual...
Bud break is a key adaptive trait that can help us understand how plants respond to a changing climate from the molecular to landscape scale. Despite this, acquisition of bud break data is currently constrained by cost, scale, and a lack of information at the plant scale on the environmental...
Anthropomorphism is described as the human tendency to see human-like shapes in the environment and robots have the potential to be anthropomorphized. However, it is unclear if anthropomorphic robots are effective in human-robot interactions (HRI). Using the context of hand sanitizer service as an application, this work assessed whether a...
A chair, once placed, will stay put until moved. Or will it? With the rise of technology being embeddable into everyday objects, what if that chair could move itself? Such robotic furniture has been featured in advertisements, art, and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research. Existing methods for operating robotic furniture have...
Pollination ecology may play an important role in the maintenance of selfing in populations of self-compatible hermaphroditic plants where both selfing and outcrossing occur (mixed mating). Behavior and abundance of pollinators can influence the two major modes of selfing; autogamy (selfing within a flower) and geitonogamy (selfing between flowers on...
Climate exerts considerable control on wildfire regimes, and climate and wildfire are both major drivers of forest growth and succession in interior Northwest forests. Estimating potential response of these landscapes to anticipated changes in climate helps researchers and land managers understand and mitigate impacts of climate change on important ecological...
Seed piece to plant transmission of the potato late blight pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, occurred with isolates of the clonal lineages US-8 in Oregon and US-11 in Washington in field trials. Average transmission rate across potato cultivars was 0.5 and 2.4% with US-8, and 0.8 and 1.0% with US-11 in 1999...