Class Projects

Hockey Robot Tournament: I designed and programmed an autonomous robot for a school-wide mechatronics hockey competition, where two robots competed to score the most goals in a five-minute match using an air hockey puck. I manufactured a lightweight, compact chassis equipped with a Pixy2 camera with ultrasonic and infrared sensors for object recognition. The robot ran on an Arduino microcontroller I programmed in C++ using PlatformIO and Visual Studio Code, implementing a Finite State Machine (FSM) architecture to optimize search, tracking, obstacle avoidance, and scoring behaviors. The robot placed 5th in the tournament.

Sterling Engine Manufacturing: In my manufacturing course, I made a working Sterling Engine using various manufacturing techniques. I gained hands-on experience using manual mills, lathes, as well as sand casting. The course also involved Design for Manufacturing techniques, tolerance stack-up analysis, and visits to manufacturing plants.

Particle Image Velocimetry: In this Fluid Mechanics lab, I used Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) to measure and visualize the flow around a NACA4418 airfoil. By capturing rapid pairs of particle-seeded flow images and processing them with PIVlab in MATLAB, I computed velocity vectors and averaged multiple datasets to remove noise. This analysis allowed us to examine flow patterns such as velocity gradients, vorticity, and shear behavior around the airfoil at different angles of attack, giving deeper insight into the fluid dynamics and performance of the airfoil.