Technical Projects

As part of a project with two other robotics students, I explored kinematic path planning for a manipulator with uncertainty in the actuators. This amounted to generating an uncertainty metric (the covariance of the actuators) in the joint space, which was then projected into the task space to act as a heuristic for path planning.

This project applies Lagrangian dynamics and some of the structures in geometric mechanics to model and control the dynamics of a manipulator that has series elastic actuators. The purpose of this project was to explore the idea of traditional manipulators with tunable compliance, which could permit working in both industrial applications and alongside people.

As part of an extended project, we were interested in producing highly dynamic legged locomotion (think running, jumping) on Agility Robotics’ Cassie. My role in this project built on some previous work by my advisor, Prof. Ross L. Hatton, to optimally choose stable body frame coordinates for this robot.

As part of a graduate course and in support of my own research, I explored methods of visualizing robot configuration spaces. This is particularly useful as these spaces grow in size, providing intuition that would otherwise be lost. This work was later expanded in my own thesis and supported other publications.

For my undergraduate capstone, I explore signal processing and audio compression with a group of peers. The project expanded my understanding of the Fourier transform in its many forms, especially where it applies to human-audible sounds.