English: Roboticist John Adrian Siegel, a member of MRISAR’s R&D team is seen here fabricating giant robotic tentacle arms that he designed for public use in museum environments to help educate millions of people worldwide.

  The Robotic tentacle arms were designed and fabricated at MRISAR, a family owned business in North Dakota. Everything from MRISAR is designed and prototyped by two generations of 4 family members; Aurora and Autumn Siegel, who began their apprenticeship in Robotics as preschoolers, along with their parents John Siegel and Victoria Lee Croasdell-Siegel. The family R&D team goals are humanitarian and educational uses for science, art & technology. The public use robotic exhibits they create for museums and science centers around the world. The devices they create are unique in the fact that they are handcrafted, not mass produced. This allows the team to create across a wide range of technologies, applications and elements of science and art. This two generation team has even invented robotic systems for NASA. 
  Science in combination with art relate to a better understanding of engineering and technology. Through creating bioinspired handcrafted devices of engineering based on elements of nature and abstract reasoning, is an exploration into how nature develops complex systems. Humanity can adapt such research and test platforms for real world applications that can assist and save lives. Such devices also serve as valuable elements of educational enrichment. From a technical vantage this specific device combines electromechanical and mechanical engineered elements with travel limits and Boolean logic to achieve a goal of mimicking lifelike movements and responses. Other key elements of design are compensation for mechanical shock load, derating electrical, derating mechanical, derating electronic and mechanical elements, analysis of materials, weight distribution and comparisons to living creature’s operating degrees of freedom. In this instance the goal of the device was the simplification of the complex muscular and nervous systems found in nature while only using a system of cables, disks, spacers, actuators and basic logic as for movements. More images of the creation of this and other MRISAR robotic devices can be seen at mrisar.org.

The work of MRISAR’s R&D team has drawn world interest for the public-use educational robotic exhibits that relate to STEM and STEAM prototypes that they create and also for their humanitarian R&D that aims to improve the quality of life. Their work has been presented before and/or published and awarded by: the United Nations, NASA-Emhart, Stanford, Cambridge, ICORR Robotics conferences, ROMAN Robotics conferences, IEEE, Discover Awards, International Federation of Robotics, etc. The “International Federation of Robotics” annual publication on Service Robotics regularly lists MRISAR Institute of Science, Art & Robotics in at least ten categories of robotics. The publication covers major contributors in the field of robotics and within that coverage focuses on the diversity of robotics, worldwide uses for robotics, economic factors and projections. Most are industrial providers, but the publication also includes NASA and other renowned research elements that reach well beyond industrial applications. In the 2011 publication MRISAR was featured in an entire chapter. The publication picks one per year for special focus in a chapter and covers a multitude of ventures in the rest of the document.