The Ground Robotic Autonomous Vehicle Lab (GRAVL) is a student-run research group at Olin where I’ve worked since I arrived at Olin. During my first year, we set our sights on research that would focus on automated dirt road leveling. We recognized that self-driving car technology has been rapidly advancing... [Read More]

For those who’ve played the game Portal or Portal 2, you probably recognized the unmistakable sentry turret from the games based on the display image (if not, here’s a side-by-side comparison for reference!) [Read More]

This project involved modifying a prebuilt tugboat and adding sensors, sensor mounts, Arduinos, and other hardware to upgrade the platform from being remote-controlled to a fully autonomous tugboat with radio communications to an off-board computer. To prove sufficient autonomous behavior, we programmed our boat to be able to do several... [Read More]

Inspired by my first year experiences working on the ROS map navigation project, I worked on a project which involved a deep-dive into the math and theory behind using extended kalman filters for SLAM as my final project in Quantitative Engineering Analysis. Working on the ROS map navigation project was... [Read More]

This class project was part of a segway robots module centered on learning about controls. The base deliverable was to get the robot to stand, drive forward, and spin, but we took this a step further and got the robot to also drive along a parametric curve. [Read More]

My friends and I wanted to learn more about SLAM, so we thought it’d be a good idea to use the final project in our Software Design class to get a headstart in learning about what goes into this complex problem. We first used the ROS package hector_slam to get... [Read More]

The topic of this project was “wearable sensing” and analyzing sensor data for a user’s benefit. My project partner and I were both involved with the fire arts club, so we asked ourselves - Could we collect data on someone’s poi spinning to determine what trick they were using, then... [Read More]

In QEA, we programmed NEATOs (robot vacuums) to complete a series of tasks while also learning the math behind the code. This project was split into a series of three smaller projects, including: [Read More]

This class project involved using eigenvectors and the Fisherface algorithm to create a facial recognition program in MATLAB. One of the main objectives of this project was to become more familiar with core linear algebra concepts and provide scaffolding for learning how to apply these concepts to the inconsistency of... [Read More]

In this project, we applied concepts from multivariable calculus and physics to create a mathematical model of our boat. The objective was to create a boat that had an angle of vanishing stability (AVS) at 130 degrees and optimize the hull shape for speed. [Read More]