Work Experience

All items are listed under a chronological order.
For a more compact summary please visit the resume tab.

Rockwell Collins

Advanced Projects Intern

During my Internship at Rockwell Collins, I worked on Project Avatar to design a Perimeter Secure Radar System and a GPS tracker that works alongside it. The project was meant to be installed at a local airport to enhance security and provide the ATC with more information regarding ground vehicles.

I was personally responsible for designing the GPS tracker's case which was given an IP68 rating and was designed to be tamperproof to increase security. This part of the project was alongside the electrical engineering interns who designed the motherboard and provided me with its specifications to build an outer covering that would protect the chip from various weather conditions. I designed this case through CATIA v5r24d and then exported the STL files to the manufacturer to build a prototype. The goals that I had to meet for this project were to be successful were:

  • Ensure that the case was water resistant and dust resistant to guarantee long term durability
  • Design the case to be as compact as possible so that it could easily be implemented in any system
  • Fabricate the case so that it was blunt and had no sharp edges to minimize accidents
I was also given the opportunity to design an algorithm that would display the shortest path to intercept a unauthorized vehicle to speed up security response. My algorithm relied on the sensor input from a ground radar station and would then filter the data to only alert security when a vehicle breached a restricted zone. It would then calculate the shortest, driveable path and display an interception route to the ground security team that would update every 3 seconds.

Hybrid Systems Laboratory

Research Assistant

Our goal for this research was to create an autonomous drone swarm light show to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. We based our system out of 20 Crazyflie 2.x drones which used Loco Positioning Nodes for navigation. They were controled using ROS on Ubuntu through a Python Script.
I was in charge of radio communication, trajectory generation and anchor placement for this project. We were also on a time crunch as we had just under two months to ensure that our system performed to the desired specifications for the show.

Radio communication was essential to ensure that the drones were the in the right position at the right time and to avoid collisions between drones by creating a safe distance of 65 cm between any operating drone. Bandwith prioritization was also performed so that there was minimum packet loss and maximum speed between the ground station and the drones.

Trajectory generation consisted of a python script that could convert an image into 3-dimensional waypoints and plan the shortest and safest path to get from one waypoint to the other in a coordinated manner. The python script could also be provided image shape coordinates if a image was not available or if it could not be understood by the script.

Anchor placement was one of the biggest challenges to this project as the radio signal would bounce off the surfaces in the indoor mission area and cause interference with the drones positioning and cause an unstable flight profile. This was significantly reduced through a python script that would take this into account and calculate the best anchor placement in a 3-dimenional room when given the mission area dimensions. This meant our project was scaleable and was only limited by the hardware.

We also learnt how to utilize gazebo to simulate a non-holonomic vehicle using LIDAR for SLAM. This was not used for our drones as our drones were too small to carry any devices to accomadate SLAM. A video of my attempt at SLAM has been provided below.

Gazebo simulation of a non-holonomic vehicle navigating through a dynamic, populated Room


6 CrazyFlie swarm test to demo song