Warlock's back! Now with an improved weapon motor mounting scheme, strengthened wheel guard attachment, repacked electronics, and a welded AR400 front wedge, Warlock made its return to Norwalk in March with a record of 2 wins and 1 loss. One of the matches, in which we faced Northwestern University Robotics Club's "Jade", ended in a knockout 12 seconds into the match, after Warlock scored a devastating hit, ripping off Jade's weapon and disabling the bot. However, the forces involved in the hit were so great, that they also snapped Warlock's 3/4 in hardened steel weapon shaft.

While at the University of Maryland, I was a part of and helped lead Team Autocycle, a student research team working to design and build a self-driving bicycle. In order to make the Autocycle work, it needed a robust control system to allow it to balance itself and follow commanded trajectories. The control design and implementation was the primary task I applied myself to, learning linear system theory in the process, and developing my skills in writing complex robotic firmware in C++.

Starting in August of 2020, I worked as a student researcher with Dr. Yancy Diaz-Mercado of the UMD Collaborative Controls and Robotics Lab. In my work, I investigated the control of a team of pursuer agents so as to guarantee capture of a faster, lone evader agent. The work resulted in the development of an improved distributed pursuer control algorithm and a set of closed form expressions for the number of pursuers needed for the geometric feasibility of capture, as well as simulation and realtime implementation in MATLAB. The results were presented at and published in the proceedings of the 2021 Modeling, Estimation, and Controls Conference (MECC2021).

While at the University of Maryland, I took a leading role in Leatherbacks, the school's fledgling combat robotics team. Warlock, a 30 pound combat robot, is the largest bot I have built to date with Leatherbacks. I took primary design responsibility for the drive system, and was also the chief machinist, making intricate parts for the drive, chassis, and weapon systems, employing CNC mills, a CNC lathe, a waterjet, multiple 3D printing technologies, and rubber casting. For the project I made use of Solidworks for CAD, and Autodesk Fusion 360 for CAM.

While at the University of Maryland, I was a part of and helped lead Team Autocycle, a student research team working to design and build a self-driving bicycle. The Autocycle, as we referred to the bike, needed many custom parts made. As the only member of the team with significant additive and subtractive manufacturing experience, I took on responsibility for DFM review and production of the needed parts, working primarily in Solidworks/HSMWorks for CAD/CAM.

After the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of 2020, I was unable to access the lab to continue my DALK work. As such, I pivoted to design and prototype a device that could help combat the pandemic: a tele-operated robot for remotely controlling Intensive Care Unit (ICU) ventilators. The project involved rapid design, prototyping, and coding, and eventually won the Innovation Award in the UK-RAS Medical Robotics for Contagious Diseases Challenge.

While at the University of Maryland, I took a leading role in Leatherbacks, the school's combat robotics team. Hubris was the second combat robot I was involved with, a 12 pounder, and the first in which I handled a significant portion of the manufacturing, doing the majority of both the design work and milling for the two drive pods that propel the bot, working in Solidworks/HSMWorks.

Starting in April of 2019, I began work with Dr. Axel Krieger of the Medical Robotics and Instrumentation lab at UMD on device for precisely robotically performing corneal transplants. Specifically, I worked on developing and validating a novel actuator for performing micro-positioning of a hypodermic needle as a part of the Deep Anterior Lamellar Keratoplasty (DALK) process. The results of this work were eventually presented at the 2021 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

The device consisted of two printed circuit boards separated by a piezo-electric stack. Each board had a small via drilled through it, and in the via was set a nichrome wire coil coated in wax. The hypodermic needle passed through both coils, and by precisely alternating the cycle of heating and cooling the coils with the extension and contraction of the piezo-electric element, the needle could be inched forward by increments of 10 microns or less. While the principle was originally developed by Mladen Barbic of HHMI, we refined the device at larger scale for surgical application.

While at the University of Maryland, I took a leading role in Leatherbacks, the school's combat robotics team. Professor Hex, a 3 pound machine, was the first combat robot I built with the team. I worked primarily on weapon system design, and learned a great deal in terms of mechanical design and manufacturing. Through the process I significantly expanded my Solidworks CAD skillset and was able to apply my classroom mechanical design and analysis knowledge to real system.

As part of Introduction to Engineering, students at the University of Maryland are expected to build a wheeled robotic vehicle to traverse sandy terrain and measure some objective. Feeling the need to challenge ourselves, my team instead decided to build a quadruped walker. I pushed the idea in its initial stages and spearheaded the development of the chassis, walking mechanism, and robotic gait. The resulting robot successfully completed the mission, and our team was awarded Most Innovative by a panel of outside judges at the final course presentation.