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Robotics

Pre-College Robotics

I participated in the FIRST Robotics Competition throughout high school on Team 102. I was the lead programmer and electrical engineer on the team for my junior and senior years. The team got to the national competition level all four years while I was in high school.

During the summer before my senior year of high school, a friend of mine and I built a RepRap 3D printer. I also created Haskell bindings for the RepRap v3 protocol.

College Robotics

I have received an undergraduate degree for my robotics additional major at CMU.

In my freshman year of college, I was an active member of the Hylo project in the CMU Robitcs Club. I helped in the design of, and was the main programmer for, a bipedal wheeled robot with articulated and movable knee and hip joints. By the end of the year we had created a working prototype that didn't have full freedom of its joints, but could balance and perform simple maneuvers.

Robotics Capstone

For my robotics capstone project in my senior year at CMU, I developed a robotic dog with two other robotics majors. We designed and built a robotic dog (named Spot) with the goal being for the dog to be able to:

  • Listen (and respond/act on) voice commands
  • Track a user and follow them
  • Fetch a ball thrown by a user and return it
  • Traverse outdoor grassy terrain
  • Look friendly!

The project was pretty successful. We were able to make Spot relatively reliable in the actions previously described. Below is a video of the final product.

ECE Capstone (18-549)

I was able to enroll in the ECE capstone in my senior year. Three of my friends and myself made a 3D scanner using an ARM microcontroller and a board we fabricated and programmed ourselves. Check out the project website (including more details of our development and pictures of the final product) here.

Robotics Mentorship

Starting in the Fall of 2025 (and the 2026 FRC season), I began mentoring FRC Team 293 SPIKE. It's great to participate in FRC again. The robots have much higher capabilities, and things are quite a bit more competitive than when I was a student participant in FIRST.