A social networking platform for intellectual, opinionated, and inquisitive people, where they can interact with a diverse set of people through audio-based group discussions. The Weekly Carca was part of Carca as a pilot forum for discussions every week on various pressing topics, and for people to learn about them from different experts in the fields.

ICRA 2022 Workshop

Autonomous, non-holonomic wheeled robots are being increasingly used in unstructured environments for operations like exploration, search and rescue, etc. Many situations may require robots to park themselves during navigation and operation in these types of environments. These situations can arise due to various reasons such as sensor failure, unfavorable operating conditions, etc., but specifying a safe parking spot and navigating to it safely can be difficult in unstructured environments. 

Together with my team I developed a planner for non-holonomic wheeled robots to reach any given goal position and orientation safely in unstructured environments with multiple obstacles. Also developed a novel solution to efficiently find a safe parking location for the robot in its surrounding environment. This allows the vehicle to either safely stop when faced with adversarial scenarios or allow other robots in its team to navigate through the environment.

Autonomous drones are being used in multiple industries, such as payload delivery and search and rescue. A common requirement for drones in these situations is to carry as much material as possible in each flight, which can be achieved by combining the payload capacity of multiple drones. I worked with my team to realize this as a dual connected quad-copter system and designed a system that is capable of performing aerial maneuvers and tasks. We developed custom hardware and software components, including the design and fabrication of the link that connects them. The dynamics of the combined system were defined and used to create a control system for safe hovering and trajectory following. We demonstrated the potential of dual connected quad-copter systems as a powerful and versatile tool for a wide range of applications.

Colorization of images using deep learning is a problem that has been tackled in multiple ways over the years. Video colorization has the added complexity of maintaining temporal consistency across multiple frames. Although this problem has gained momentum in recent times, there has been much less research effort focused on video colorization compared to image colorization. I worked on implementing different baseline architectures of CNNs, visual attention, generative models, and experimenting with different loss functions to obtain better fully-automatic video colorization results.

As part of a team, we aimed to calibrate the positioning of a robotic arm with a camera mounted on the end-effector using a SLAM-based method. Specifically, we used the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to achieve this goal. To approximate the camera's extrinsic parameters, we utilized its intrinsic parameters and a set of feature markers in a workspace. We also deployed an EKF-based measurement model to effectively localize the camera and compute the camera-to-end-effector transformation. During the project, we tested this approach on a UR5 manipulator with an Intel RealSense D435i depth camera mounted on the end-effector and successfully validated our results.

The KickFlip - The Cooking Robot to automate frying and grilling within a home kitchen and a small-scale restaurant. Potential alternative to more expensive options like Flippy, Popcake and Cinder Grill in the market. We designed the prototype of KickFlip to save time and effort in the kitchens through increased autonomy during the cooking process through food monitoring and interaction.  

AuReClE can be retrofitted into existing logistic vehicles with a perception system and a heads-up display for assisting the drivers. Using a vision pipeline (image processing and neural network), our system will estimate the clearance in the upcoming structure, and based on the vehicle dimensions, it would give a go-no-go warning through a heads-up display to the driver to prevent any injuries and damages.

Solar Cookers invariably depend on various factors that affect their performance and efficiency. The amount of irradiation available being one of the prime affecters, the wind speed as well as the cooker design affects its performance situationally. Conducted research and testing on different types of solar cooker designs and compared their performance parameters and efficiency based on ASAE standards.

Built a MATLAB GUI to perform static structural analysis on different truss structure designs such as Gambrel, Howe, K-Truss, etc. Any custom truss structure could be drawn in the internface and its stress vectors were generated based on force applied at a certain point on the truss using FEM.

Designed and fabricated a 4-legged walker primarily to learn different production. But, also to design a locomotion mechanism that can be used to control easily with just a single actuator and can be implemented in field robots.  The walker's mechanism was based on the Jansen’s linkage as it has SDOF and operates smoothly in various conditions; Also, it looks really cool in operation!

The future of high altitude wind energy is vast as the winds are stronger and more stable at high altitudes The Airborne Wind Energy System (AWES) was a proposed prototype system to harness power from high-altitude winds and produce energy more efficiently compared to the traditional ground windmills. At the same time solve the various drawbacks posed by the traditional ground windmills, such as noise, ecological impact, high cost, and immobility.

Move it! is inspired from the “The World's Hardest Game.”  The game was developed as a C++ GUI application with different functionalities and various pre-made levels. The game also incorporated a custom  game level making tool which allowed the players to make and play their own levels.