Work / Mobile robotics, concepts Simulation
Early work
Vision-guided mobile robots and a tidal-energy concept
Two 2023 projects established the lab's approach to small, cheap autonomous robots: keep the robot simple and move the heavy computation off-board.
Navigation by image processing
An ESP32-CAM mobile robot streams video to a server on the local network. The server runs OpenCV shape detection to find markers and sends navigation commands back, offloading heavy processing from the robot. The robot includes a teleoperation mode and a custom enclosure. A companion Webots simulation used a C++ controller with OpenCV vision for pillar detection and a gripper-based object task.
AlgaGen, Spark Innovation Challenge
A prototype for hydrogen generation using tidal waves as a clean, renewable energy source, with a year of research proving the concept and reaching the project milestones.