Research

Master's Thesis

Forest fire simulation requires a large amount of data processing to operate. Current forest fires do not operate in real-time, making them less useful for real-world fire fighting situations. The goal of this work is to implement a full-scale forest fire simulator that operates in a near real time scale. The propagation method for this simulator is processed using the high performance parallel programming language CUDA and the rest of the simulator is written in C++.

Senior Project: Sample Return Robot

This project was inspired by NASA's Robotic Sample Return Challenge. My team designed and implemented a search and return robot that would search for, detect, collect and return a tennis ball to a home base. The robot had a pre-built map of the environment to navigate. The robotic platform we used was the Pioneer Robot. My portion of the project was the global and local navigation. The global navigation was needed for the robot to know how to navigate to its home base, and also to track where it had searched to avoid repeating regions. The local navigation was meant to maneuver the robot into a location where its gripper could pick up a tennis ball once one had been detected.