Los Alamos Dynamic Summer School
During the summer of 2018, I worked as an intern at Los Alamos National Lab as part of the LADSS program. As part of this program, I worked on a three person team to develop new techniques for characterizing metallic melt pools. This project culminated in a conference paper and presentation for IMAC as well as a poster presentation (shown above) for the student symposium at LANL. The thesis for the project is shown below.
Automated Box Sorting Machine
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- Wiring Diagram of the Box Sorting Machine
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- Assembled CAD Parts
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- Sorting Machine After the Competition
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- Laser Cut Parts Layout
As part of the Mechatronics class at New Mexico Tech, I worked with a team to design and build an automated box sorting machine. The machine was completely automated and it was designed to sort 3 types of boxes (clear cube boxes, cube boxes full of skittles, and a half height box that was full of coffee beans) into seperate bins. Our machine competed against 15 other teams to sort as many boxes as possible in 3 minutes. Of the 18 competing designs, ours was the 3rd best!
We designed our machine to be as simple and robust as possible. The boxes were moved to the different bins using a conveyor belt. We used a single laser and photo-resistor to differentiate between the full sized skittles box and the other boxes.Then, the clear box and the coffee box were easily separated with a bar that guided the full sized clear box off of the conveyor belt while the half sized coffee box was able to pass under it. Using this method, our machine sorted 100% of the boxes boxes correctly during testing and 98% during the competition.
I was responsible for doing the CAD work for the laser cut pieces, programming the micro-controller, and the electrical wiring and pneumatic plumbing for this project. I also helped to create the initial design of the machine and assemble the final product.
Augmented Reality Design Team
During my second year of design clinic, I was a part of the “Augmented Reality Smart Facility” team. We worked together to develop an application for the Microsoft Hololense. This included creating a user permissions hierarchy, creating a smart chemical cabinet, creating a navigation system, and creating an item marking system and database. We developed the application in Unity with Vuforia and HoloToolkit. As part of the team, I primarily worked on developing the item database and marking system.
Battle Field Robot Evacuation Design Team
New Mexico Tech has a 2 year (4 semester) design clinic program and for my first year, I was part of the “Battlefield Evacuation Robot Optimization” team. The goal of this project was to refurbish and adapt a Paralax Quadrover so it could pull a wounded soldier out of particularly hazardous zones on the battlefield while requiring minimal setup and input from the operators. The robot was light and small enough to be deployed by two people from a Humvee.
I programmed the micro-controller that interpreted inputs from the control software that was developed by the computer science students on the team. Additionally, I rewired the electronics and actuators to adapt them from connecting to the original (and broken) propeller board to work with an arduino mega instead. I also helped diagnose and fix issues with the robot as well as aided in designing the arm and winch system.