Experiences

Aberystwyth Robotics Club

Principle Student Volunteer: I am one of the principle student ambassadors for the outreach robotics club for secondary school children, during this time I have helped to create worksheets and delivered courses of various technologies such as the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. During summer of 2016 I designed, built and created worksheets for 10 robots to be used by 13 year olds. This involved communicating and explaining complex control systems and behaviours to school children to implement as part of the course.

Undergraduate's Robotics Society

  • Co-Founder and President: I am a co-founder and the president for the undergraduate robotics club, which allows enthusiastic undergraduates to work on the hardware and software aspects of robotics. I am responsible for the weekly running of workshops and managing the administrative tasks such as maintaining member databases, websites and organising events such as participation in society fairs and British Science Week.
  • Curriculum, Technical Support and Project Mentoring: Encouraging and supporting students into being able to build, wire-up and program their first robot. I have created and developed a curriculum for students to follow, which includes actuators, sensors and various robotic behaviours https://github.com/arcub/magician-chassis.
    I also mentor and provide technical support to individuals and groups working on robotic projects by communicating comprehensively, how to solve both hardware and software designs and problems.

Control Systems for an Interactive Mars Rover

  • ◦ Project: My third year project is to research, design and implement control systems for a Mars rover, to be used for outreach purposes. The aim is to be able to demonstrate the scientific instruments such as the panoramic camera, and the on-board lab for analysing rock samples.
  • Control System: All the hardware on the rover is connected to an Arduino microcontroller, sending signals to the motor controllers and reading data from the sensors. This is connected via serial to a Raspberry Pi computer which acts on the higher level decisions, such as avoiding obstacles and dealing with input, from the user interface.
  • Scientific Payload: The scientific payload includes a camera which is relayed back to the user interface to guide the operator on future movements. This in the future, could use machine vision to traverse across a planned path.
    To make the rover more interactive, RFID tags are added to each rock sample, allowing children to add samples into the tray. This then returns the rock type and mineralogy to the user interface.
  • User Interface: All data is displayed on a web-enabled user interface such as obstacle detection, the type and mineralogy of rock samples, the speed, direction and tilt of the rover. The actuators such as, drive motors and pan/tilt camera on board the robot, can be controlled via the user interface, allowing the operator to control the hardware instantaneously or by mimicking the communication delay in real space missions.

Details for my major project can be found by clicking the button below.

Software for 'Barnes', a full-scale model Mars Rover

  • More information coming soon.

More information about Barnes can be found at the website below: