According to Dr. Chris Donaghue, Ph.D., LCSW, CST, “There are a good number of psychological benefits associated with incorporating sex toys into relationships and self-pleasure”. This is also widely accepted across the pleasure product and medical industries. Pleasure products like sex toys can positively impact users’ quality of sleep, self esteem, and relationships. While there is a wide variety of pleasure products available on the current market, few of these options are suitable for people with limited range of motion. This inequity within the sex toy industry negatively impacts the wellness of people with limited range of motion. These negative impacts range from lowered self esteem and happiness to greater stress and conflict within sexual relationships both with others and with themselves. This project seeks to provide a meaningful design solution for people with limited range of motion, and provide insight on the design considerations that must be taken within the pleasure product industry to better address the needs of people with limited range of motion.

Exploration of icy moons in the search for extra-terrestrial life is becoming a major focus in the NASA community. As such, the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) robot has been proposed to survey Saturn's Moon, Enceladus. EELS is a snake-like robot that will use helically grousered wheels to propel itself forward through the complex terrains of Enceladus. This moon's surface is composed of a mixture of snow and ice. Mobility research in these types of terrains is still under-explored, but must be done for the EELS robot to function. As such, this thesis will focus on the methodologies required to effectively simulate wheel interaction with cohesive media from a computational perspective. Three simulation tools will be briefly discussed: COMSOL Multiphysics, EDEM-ADAMS, and projectChrono. Next, the contact models used in projectChrono will be discussed and the methodology used to implement a custom Johnson Kendall Roberts (JKR) collision model will be explained. Finally, initial results from a cone penetrometer test in projectChrono will be shown. Qualitatively, the final simulations look correct, and further work is being done to quantitatively validate them as well as simulate more complex screw geometries.