Info up till May 2025
A Rocket Engine that solves the staging problem enabling Single Stage To Orbit flight, thus reducing the likelihood of catastrophic in-flight failure during staging and lowering space travel costs significantly. It does this by tackling the cooling problem with traditional aerospike nozzles essentially creating a ‘Vortex-based Virtual Aerospike’ formed by a set of vortices, a column of air and other complex aerodynamic phenomena to achieve a 100% truncated aerospike (made out of air itself).
Built a fully autonomous soccer rover for the TTU ECE Robotics Project Lab, running all decision-making on a single Raspberry Pi Pico 2 with only 520 KB of RAM.
The robot detects and classifies colored balls, estimates ball position using onboard camera vision, avoids obstacles with dual ToF LiDAR, tracks field boundaries with IR sensors, and uses IMU-based heading correction for real-time autonomous navigation, tuned down to ~0.15º.
I designed and integrated the full system across software, hardware, and mechanical design: camera calibration and filtering, ball centroid/size detection, color-based scoring logic, drivetrain control, servo gate actuation, ball intake/shooting, obstacle avoidance, field-position estimation, mechanical CAD, 3D printing, assembly, and iterative testing.
The rover also uses a custom PCB with DRV8876 motor drivers and overcurrent protection, powered from a single 9.6 V NiMH battery under competition constraints with no external communication.
This project pushed me deeper into the work I want to keep doing: autonomous systems, robotics, embedded software, sensor fusion, controls, custom hardware, and full-stack hardware/software integration.
