Class Projects

Description

This was a class project I completed at Stanford University during the second year of my Ph.D in a mechatronics course. The course focused primarily on designing circuits for interfacing with sensors and actuators in robotic systems. As part of a team of four, I built an autonomous robot that collected balls and deposited them in a scoring zone during the final three weeks of the class. This consisted primarily of mechanical design of the robots structure as well as designing circuits for controlling the drive motors and line detection sensors..

Contributions/ Skills Used

As part of a team of four students my primary contributions to the project were...

• Design of circuits on the robot which did the following: motor driving, line detection sensor reading, running LEDs for showing robot state

• State diagram for outlining how the robot would respond to stimuli and navigate to the scoring zone with event driven, non-blocking, code

• design and manufacturing of the ball collection pin

Description

This was a class project I completed at Stanford University during the first year of my Ph.D. The class matches teams of 6-8 students, half of which are working from another university outside the US, with corporate sponsors to complete a year-long design challenge. Our team consisted of 4 Stanford students and 3 students from the Hasso Platner Institute in Germany. Our corporate sponsor with Hyundai.

The original prompt Hyundai proposed was to transform the car into a communication space. They are specifically interested in us developing communication technology that can be used once fully-autonomous cars become commonplace in 10-15 years. Our approach to this challenge was to focus on designing an autonomous family car, which we refer to as a Presence. This vehicle should allow children, ages 10 and above, to get to their activities without their parents needing to coordinate how to get them there. It should also allow children to seamlessly communicate with their parents or caretakers so that valuable social experiences are not lost even though their caretaker is not physically transporting them to all of their activities. This should not only give older children more independence, but will also reduce the amount of time parents or caretakers spend coordinating pickups and drop-offs. We did this by designing and building a transparent video-call screen that is intended to reduce motion sickness as well as an app that allows parents to see multiple views of the vehicle, call their child, and also schedule and reroute trips. The vehicle also has a variety of safety features, including FaceID and 2-factor authentication, to ensure that the right passenger has entered the vehicle.

Contributions/ Skills Used

As part of a team of seven students, my primary role on the team was mechanical design of the video call screen and enclosures for the cameras placed in the car. I also helped produce several prototypes for different ideas meant to attack this problem throughout the course of the year and worked with my teammates to conduct interviews and develop user personas. My primary contributions to the final product were.

• Mechanical Design (in Onshape) and fabrication of the video call screen and camera mounts/ enclosures

• Development of user personas

• Iterative prototyping

• User interviews

Description

As part of my senior capstone project, I worked with a team of 20 MIT undergraduate students to design an autonomous surface vehicle intended to measure the ionosphere. The ionosphere is the ionized layer of the atmosphere where GPS and radio signals must pass. Fluctuations in the level of ionization in this level of the atmosphere can cause inaccuracy in GPS localization. Currently, devices that can measure these fluctuations, ionosondes, are majorly land based. This leaves large gaps over the oceans where we cannot monitor the dynamics of the ionosphere in real time. Lincoln Laboratory is developing a unique payload that will use a two-station method as opposed to the more typical vertical sounding method. In order to support this payload, Lincoln Laboratory plans to deploy a fleet of autonomous surface vessels to oceanic regions. We were tasked with designing the first robot of this fleet 

Contributions/ Skills Used

As part of a team of 20 students, my primary task was developing a list of requirements to ensure the robot’s mechanical structure could withstand the conditions we anticipated it would experience at sea and using FEA to determine whether or not the robot’s structure could meet those requirements

• Modeling of sea states in the intended deployment region to determine power requirements for the system

• Modeling drag on the system to ensure it could follow a predetermined route in the anticipated sea conditions

• FEA on the robot’s structure to ensure it could handle the forces anticipated during months of travel at sea