Professional Projects

Selected academics, research, and industry projects

Autonomous Soil Sampling

The goal is to design a system integration framework that enables the robotic platform to collect and analyze soil samples efficiently in unknown environments. The main challenge is to integrate all the subsystems together into a complete robotic package that satisfies the mission requirements. The following work presents a novel system integration methodology and demonstrates a feasible solution to integrate the adaptive sampling algorithm with a GUI interface, HEBI robotic base platform, portable X-ray fluorescence sensor, soil manipulation mechanism, as well as other sensing suites such as GPS module, and Lidar sensing suite.

J. Norby., S. Wang, V. Nava, H. Wang, S. Deng, N. Jones, A. Mishra, C. Pavlov, H. He, S. Subramanian, S. Hordern, N. Sihota, T. Hoelen, A. M. Johnson, and G. V. Lowry, “Path to Autonomous Soil Sampling and Analysis by Ground-based Robots.” in preparation

S. Deng, S. Wang, H. Wang, I. Krause, N. Sihota, T. Hoelen, G. V. Lowry, and A. M. Johnson, "Autonomous efficient soil sampling with a ground-based robotic system," in preparation for submission to Journal of Field Robotics

Torsobot - Inverted Pendulum

The first iteration(left) and the second iteration(right). The goal is to design and build a rimless wheel robot to study human walking motions. My goal is to program Raspberry Pi in ROS with Python and Arduino to realize better sensor integration, more stable PID control, and code reliability. Programs are written in Python in ROS. The new system has an optimized cascade PID controller, a more complicated torso, a dual drive system, a belt-tightening system, a new communication protocol, etc. The robot has been tested and with dual PID parameters, the robot could start on its own and achieve the desired speed.

Selected CMU Course Projects

Gummy Bear Detector: Analog circuit design, built with logic gates, shift registers, resistors, transistors, amplifiers, and LEDs

Arcade Game (Down the Clown): Built with STM32 controller (embedded C – register-based, state machine), logic gates, shift registers, transistors, amplifiers, motor drivers, motors, and other sensors. The GUI was designed with Processing (Java)

Planner Design (PacMan): PacMan planning (LTRA-star) in a partially observed environment with adversarial agents (A-star) in OpenGL

Controller Design (Webot): Developed and tuned controllers (Feedback, Feedforward, LQR, MRAC), and Extended Kalman Filter

Industry Projects

ThermoFisher Scientific (Left): Led and engineered a multi-colored LED lightbar project, commercially launched on Nicolet Summit FTIR PRO spectrometer in 2019.

Enerpac Tool Group (Right): E-Pulse is a high pressure electric hydraulic pump. I primarily worked on the product launch including resolving a critical electrical design flaw, and electrical / software testing.