Neuromuscular Control
During 2014 and 2015, I worked in Hartmut Geyer’s Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. I collaborated with other students in the lab to evaluate neuromuscular control models on a robotic leg. During this time I also investigated the use of compact nonlinear springs with user-defined torque profiles for increased bandwidth and torque resolution in Series Elastic Actuators.
Publications:
Austin, Jessica, Alexander Schepelmann, and Hartmut Geyer. “Control and evaluation of series elastic actuators with nonlinear rubber springs.”Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on. IEEE, 2015. (link) (pdf)
Schepelmann, Alexander, Jessica Austin, and Hartmut Geyer. “Evaluation of decentralized reactive swing-leg control on a powered robotic leg.” Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on. IEEE, 2015. (link) (pdf)
Antibiotic Apprentice, an educational game
As part of a class at CMU, two other students and I developed an educational game to help medical students study for exams. You can read about it in my blog post here. If you’d like to play the game, let me know and I’ll send you a download link.
RegexQuest, a game to learn regular expressions
Having a good working knowledge of regular expressions is essential for most developers. However, while it’s easy to learn the concept, it takes lots of practice to gain fluency. For this reason (and also for fun of course), I’ve started building RegexQuest. The game does not teach regular expressions from scratch, but instead tries to improve fluency. Practice happens whenever you “cure” an infected villager by using a regular expression.
The game currently has one working level, and I have plans for a few more. Feedback and pull requests are welcome!
DARPA Urban Challenge
I was a member of Team Caltech, which competed in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Alice, our vehicle, is pictured above. I worked on the preliminary navigation software, and later on the team’s simulation software.
You can read about our approach here: Sensing, Navigation and Reasoning Technologies for the DARPA Urban Challenge
Open-source Contributions
Jenkins Artifact QR Code Plugin
Jenkins Build-With-Parameters Plugin
Bug fixes and enhancements for DbMaintain, Jenkins Build Pipeline Plugin, Jenkins Publish-Over-SSH Plugin, Jenkins Conditional Buildstep Plugin, and Jenkins Parameterized Trigger Plugin.
ChiBots SRS Robomagellan 2011 and 2012
This project was in conjunction with Bill Mania.
You can read the contest description and rules, an overview of the robot’s architecture, or browse the code on github.
Iohannes, a mobile robot powered an Android Phone
Check out an overview of the project or browse the code on github. I also gave a presentation for Chicago Google Tech User Group (GTUG) in Spring of 2012.
Arduino Projects
Remotely controlled camera pan/tilt unit
And finally…