Portfolio

Solo: Revolutionary autonomous sewer inspection robot
3D Laser Range Finder: First generation spinning laser range scanner designed and built for autonomous subterranean cave mapping robots.
High Speed Mobile Robot: Differential drive autonomous mobile robot built around a SICK laser scanner. High speed allowed novel concepts in team planning to be researched.
Stair Climbing Simulation: Design & simulation of a concept for flexible and controlled stair climbing. The robot can independently control movement on a step versus movement to climb to the next step.

Papers

Running robots has long been a dream of the research community. But to see this dream, numerous and difficult engineering challenges of weight, power, & control must be solved. Jonathan Hurst based his PhD thesis on these challenges and I was fortunate to work with him at length on his leg design.

This paper was one portion of that work - analysis of potential energy storage devices which store the shock of toe impact for use in push-off. For my part in his research I graduated Carnegie Mellon with an Mechanical Engineering Research Honors degree.

Relative Localization in Colony Robots

The colony project demonstrated the coordinated discovery and capture of a mobile target using a colony of low-cost robots. Each robot alone is insufficient to the task, but together they can overcome their shortcomings.

This paper was presented at the 2005 NCUR conference and and was a project of the CMU Robotics Club.

CMU Capstone Engineering Design

Carnegie Mellon's Engineering Design class teaches product development process through industry sponsors soliciting product ideas. Our team was funded by Alcoa (an aluminum manufacturer), whom asked us to design & prototype products for the trucking industry.

The paper is the final report we delivered to Alcoa. It covers our product development process & analysis in detail and includes renderings of the delivered prototype.

Human Detection by Tartan Swarm

Tartan Swarm was an autonomous, multi-robot entry in the 2002 AAAI Mobile Robot Urban Search and Rescue Competition. The robots were designed to be low-cost, adaptable, and disposable. Emphasis was given to human detection techniques and not absolute localization.