My Robotics Journey (so far):
I got into robotics during my last three semesters of college. I was on a senior design project with Florida Space Institute and NASA to implement the EZ-RASSOR Software on a 3D-printend Mini-RASSOR. That’s when I first learned about ROS (Robotic Operating System) and how cool it is.
This project was a lot of fun, and it lead me to eventually want to work on my own robots. I’ll do a deep dive into my experience with this project in a blog post here soon–it was a pretty fun project and I love talking about it with people!
The summer after my second semester senior year, I got more into THT soldering with protoboards and started to create a basic robot. Originally there wasn’t really a goal here other than to make something cool I could remotely control. I have a few pictures of what some of these initial projects looked like that I’ll share in a blog post here soon.
My third semester in Fall of 2022 I took a class called Autonomous Systems Programming. The class involved learning the essentials of ROS1 and autonomous programming. Many of our assignments involved interfacing with ROS Unity simulations made by the instructor, and this was the first time I learned about using ROS to interface with Unity Game Engine and other simulation environments.
After I graduated I landed a NASA OSTEM internship at Kennedy Space Center! I worked on simulation software at Swamp Works–the very facility where the RE-RASSOR was developed! My university published an article where I discuss this in further detail–feel free to give it a read!
Needless to say, working at Swamp Works and seeing the cool robotics projects being worked on pushed me to want to pursue a career in autonomous robotics and space. To this point, I’m pursuing an online Master’s in Computer Science with a focus on robotics at Georgia Tech.
My hope is to center my master’s thesis on the topic of using ROS in space-related applications. I don’t have a definitive area of focus in this area yet, but I am doing research to figure this out and hope to have a post about it soon!
Right now, I am in the midst of planning a trip to Denmark to attend two robotics conferences–ROSCon and ICSR. I hope to learn a lot from this trip, both on ROS and the usage of software in the robotics industry!
This page will be updated for sure as I move forward in my journey, so be sure to check back often!