Projects – The Robot Baseball Lab

Robotics and AI Projects

Robot Manipulator System Identification

Precise positioning of an end effector is extremely important for small, delicate tasks. The kinematic parameters of a robot manipulator can be difficult to measure with the precision required to achieve this level of control over robot pose, especially in open-loop systems where the robot has no external way to measure its pose, precise positioning and orientation can become impossible. System identification using motion capture allows more precise estimates of robot parameters to be obtained. I wrote several different algorithms that could do a variety of system identification tasks using motion capture data, from improving the accuracy of measured kinematic parameters to generating sets of kinematic parameters using only motion capture data and knowledge about the number of joints in the manipulator.

Utah Open-Source Bionic Leg

For transfemoral amputees (people with a leg amputated above the knee) activities like walking up stairs or transitioning from sitting to standing can be extremely difficult, sometimes impossible. These motions require adding energy to combat the force of gravity and for transfemoral amputees, the muscles in the residual limb are no longer able to perform that function. Active prosthetics (i.e., prosthetic limbs with motors in place of muscles) can solve this problem. In an effort to make this technology more accessible I helped design and program the electrical systems for the first version of an open-source active prosthetic leg built using off-the-shelf and 3D printed parts.

BYU Mars Rover Team

Imagine traveling across a Martian desert. Most people will never get the opportunity but traversing a desert in southern Utah can be a close second. For my undergrad senior project, I designed and manufactured parts for the BYU Mars rover's chassis, drivetrain, and robotic arm. We competed at the University Rover Competition in southern Utah where we placed 9th out of 30+ teams from schools around the world (only our world though, no actual Martians chose to enter the competition).

CAD Portfolio

GenNext Robotic Hand

This is not a true robotic hand as it is not actuated, but it was a design project that I enjoyed none the less! The challenge was to design "the next thing" (i.e., the next version of a product). I chose to design the next version of a robotic hand, taking my inspiration from the movie Chappie which had recently come out at the time I was working on this. It was a great exercise in surface modeling, using design tables to create different versions of a part, and making product renders.

LEGO Football Stadium

Who doesn't love to play with LEGO?!? Turns out LEGOs are a lot less fun when you are creating them using design tables in SolidWorks and then assembling them using the mate commands (you need three mates to constrain all the degrees of freedom of a brick and there were 343 bricks in this build...that's a lot of mates). The end result is very cool though, a model of BYU's Lavell Edwards Stadium that could be sold for a pretty penny as a LEGO Architecture set.