About
I am presently working at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a Robotics Systems Engineer. I received my Master’s of Science degree in Computer Science: Intelligent Robotics at the University of Southern California in 2021 where I worked for the USC Interaction Lab while also interning at the NASA JPL. I am primarily interested in how autonomous robots can be used to solve problems for those with the greatest needs and to teach future scientists & engineers. To that end, I have devoted myself to learning about and gaining experience with all of the underlying technologies, specifically from a integration, control and artificial intelligence perspective.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
For the moment I am working on a lunar rover concept, mixed reality robot control, and a prospective open source motion planning library. Previously I worked on a snake robot called EELS, nighttime global localization with ShadowNav, and high-speed off-road autonomy integration for RACER.
Past Work
I helped to develop a photorealistic Lunar simulation in Blender in order to aid research projects which are investigating high speed rover nighttime navigation on the moon, especially around permanently shadowed regions (PSRs).
I developed and deployed semantic image segmentation and rover energy estimation technology which may one day allow us to deploy high speed fully autonomous rovers to Mars and other extraterrestrial bodies. This work is well summarized in this youtube video. Autonomous exploration is important due to the latency between human controllers and rovers when they are on separate planets.
Interaction Lab
At the interaction lab I worked to develop a robotic system to enable human robot interaction (HRI) research. This took the form of a robot operating system (ROS) stack called HARMONI which we structured to make it easy to add new robots (robot agnostic) and create new interactions for research.
Publications
I have published a number of papers in the past few years; the full list can be found here.
Side-Projects
I was most recently involved with USC Makers where I led a team to build a robot to pass butter. Joining Makers was one of my better decisions while attending USC. The club has been able to nurture a thriving makers community despite the nature of COVID and remote work. I had a lot of fun with this group and still talk to the members from time to time.