Projects
Autonomous Mobile Robot
I led a team to build an Autonomous Mobile Robot - a prototype for a farm based robot that automatically detects and reports on the health of plants. The full system included a Kalman filter combining wheel encoder and computer vision information for localisation, a time varying LQR trajectory tracking controller, and computer vision to classify plants and their health! Implemented on an NVIDIA Jetson platform in ROS with a mixture of C++ and python.
Plasma-Powered Autonomous Drag Reduction
Investigated novel Autonomous Control strategies for a Dielectric Discharge Barrier Plasma Actuator (DBDPA). These actuators consist of light weight films with flexible copper electrodes embedded in an insulator. By passing extremely high voltages between the electrodes, you can ionise the air, creating a small jet of wind. Such actuators have achieved as much as a 78% reduction in skin friction drag with net power savings!
Jeff, the Chess Playing Robotic Arm
Led the mechanical and trajectory controller design for Jeff, a 4 DOF robotic arm that plays chess against human opponents. Coded in Matlab, Jeff's controller features an inverse kinematics solver and a task-space velocity controller. Jeff ended up winning 1st place in his Robotics Systems class. Check out the lighthearted educational video I made about Jeff here!
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Rocky, The Boxing Helmet that reduces Risk of Concussion by 80%
Driven by my own frustration and concerns over protecting my brain health as an amateur boxer, I invented Rocky - a new boxing helmet that reduces risk of concussion by as much as 80%. Rocky reduces concussion inducing rotational acceleration by 50% by diverting the kinetic energy of a punch, rather than trying to absorb it. I built my own test stand and anatomically accurate dummy to rigorously test various iterations of my design. Please see my explainer video here!
