I am a 2nd year master’s student majoring in Robotics at the University of Pennsylvania. I obtained a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and a Minor in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida. My experience in robotics has primarily been on the hardware, mechanical design, and controls aspects. This experience was gained from working with mobile robots and rehabilitation robots. I look forward to working in other areas of robotics such as rescue and exploratory robotics, manufacturing, and medical robotics.
I first began working with robots in high school through FIRST Robotics Competition, primarily on the mechanical and electrical design aspects. At the University of Florida, I gained experience with linear and nonlinear controls as well as mechanical and electrical design. I learned about linear controls through my Control of Mechanical Systems and Dynamics and Control System Design Laboratory courses. As a research assistant in the Nonlinear Controls and Robotics Laboratory, I worked on the mechanical design of testbeds and acquired knowledge on nonlinear controls.
Furthermore, I applied this mechanical design and controls knowledge for my thesis on Functional Electrical Stimulation Induced Cadence Control of a Hand Cycle. At the University of Florida, I also developed two robotic systems: a mobile robot and a rehabilitation robot. The mobile robot was a robotic ball manipulator for my Design & Manufacturing Laboratory course. The rehabilitation robot, Uplift™, was a powered adaptive exercise machine for wheelchair bound individuals developed for my senior design project. The design was further refined and prototyped in a continuation course.
At the University of Pennsylvania, I have been able to experience the programming side of robotics and obtain more experience with controls in robotic applications. I learned about trajectory planning, kinematics, and dynamics of manipulator arms and mobile robots in my Introduction to Robotics course. In addition, I used this information to develop a 2D potential guided rapidly-exploring random trees (P-RRT) planning algorithm on NAO Robots. I built upon this foundation in Advanced Robotics where the concepts of planning, control, and vision were used to develop a position controller and trajectory generator for a quadrotor, CrazyFlie 2.0.
Moreover, I explored the topics of image feature detection, image morphing, image stitching, and deep learning with respect to images in my Computer Vision & Computational Photography course. I am looking forward to gaining hands-on experience with Robot Operating System (ROS) and service robots in my Integrated Intelligence for Robotics course in Fall 2020. Finally, I learned how to apply aircraft performance and design, static and dynamic stability, flight dynamics, and control to fixed-wing and rotary-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).