Experience
Maidbot- Hardware Engineering Intern (Fall of 2021)
Rosie- the first product put out by Maidbot (the robots got to work on are not ready to be unveiled yet)
Maidbot is a robotics company focused on building cleaning robots for the hospitality industry.
As a Hardware Engineering Intern, my main tasks focused on performing quality assurance tests on the newly built robots. Tests consisted of placing known masses of debris onto different types of flooring to collect and evaluate cleaning data. Occasionally, bots would have significant outliers which would lead to root cause analysis.
I then took the initiative to use this data to predict the cleanability of bots based on features such as roller current and impeller mass flow rate. This project was interesting because it was the first time I used real-time data. Every day, we gathered new information which contributed to the regression model I was building. This project also had a lot of preprocessing because of the manner data was collected. It required me to
Texas Instruments - Mechanical Design Engineer (Summer of 2021)
The goal of my summer project was to design the mechanical components of a 160 watt Near-Infrared Laser. The way it works is light from the laser would hit a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) and output an image, passing through an assortment of lenses, mirrors, and other optical components along it's path. The DMD has the capability of shaping the project light image by turning on and off any one of the several thousand mirrors on the DMD to output a display.
There were three things that made this project so challenging:
1) Prototype Limitations- As this was a prototype, the optical components could not be custom designed which led to parts being up to .1 mm close to each other. Real hard to mount a lens if you only have a .1 mm gap.
2) Modularity- As with all mechanical designs, there are tolerance stackups. With light, however, there is very little room to play with as any slight misalignment would result in a large error further down the light's path (Sine Error). Not to mention this was 160 watts of invisible light... You really could not blink fast enough to avoid permanent eye damage. This meant that each component had to crucially reduce tolerance and allow for some adjustment. On top of all this, we needed to measure the light as it passes through the optics which meant parts needed to be removable altogether as well.
3) Thermal Management- A DMD typically receives about 5 watts of light. 160 watts was a huge thermal increase that starts introducing problems like thermal expansion. We later learned that light diffraction (similar to the double-slit experiment) was causing some issues. I also forgot to mention that the mirrors on the DMD can't turn "off". Their mirrors so the light has to be going somewhere that won't melt with 160 watts of light.
You can see the solutions to these problems and my designs themselves in the PowerPoint below. I learned a ton at this internship and a lot about design from this team. They have really shown me what an internship should be and I highly recommend working for Texas Instruments (with some bias to their Digital Light Projection (DLP) team)!
Final Internship Presentation.pptxWilder Systems Robots - Applications Engineering Intern (Summer of 2020)
Wilder Systems Robots is a startup using Fanuc robots to automate the washing and drilling of an aircraft.
My primary role as an intern here, was to help out as