One summer project involved lifting a ReadyMadeRC Anaconda aircraft several hundred feet in the air using one of our large quadcopters, and then dropping it into free flight. Though successful, the flights exposed a serious hazard: the underslung load tends to start pendulum-like oscillation when moved. This is both difficult to damp out through manual …
My thesis project in grad school was the design, implementation, and testing of a system for navigating drones through indoor spaces. The system should address the domain-specific challenges of indoor flight: No GPS Unreliable Magnetometer and Barometer Smaller areas -> tighter control and smaller margins Live environment, with dynamic obstacles I proposed and implemented a …
Maverick is a from-scratch Flight Control System for multi-rotor and fixed-wing UAVs. It was conceived as a way to put together my experience over the last several years as a UAV researcher, and as a learning opportunity to get first-hand experience at low-level embedded system design, particularly the PCB, RTOS, and device driver levels. In …
Spirithawk is a sponsored research project performed at VCU, in collaboration with UVA and sponsored by the Army. The most significant output of this research was a unique VTOL, tri-motor aircraft capable of being 3D-printed and assembled with zero hardware (snap-together construction). With UVA providing aircraft design and manufacturing expertise, VCU, with myself as the …
HackerLights was a project to develop tools to “paint with light”, meaning that anyone could develop full-motion, full-color light patterns for the popular WS2812 addressable LED products. Patterns weren’t simple repetitive algorithms, but were designed in image and/or video editors and streamed off of MicroSD cards. This meant that each pattern was truly a blank …