UAV & Robotics Systems
Airframe to autonomy, including the parts nobody wants to own.
Whole-vehicle work rather than one slice of it: structures, propulsion, avionics, telemetry and autonomous behaviour, plus the fabrication to actually build the thing. I have taken vehicles from a requirement to a flying, tested prototype across electric, turbine and underwater propulsion.
Typical engagements
- Design and fabricate a purpose-built airframe for a payload or mission
- Select and validate propulsion, including thrust-stand testing
- Integrate and tune a flight stack (ArduPilot, PX4, MAVLink)
- Implement autonomous behaviours: docking, station-keeping, swarm coordination
- Diagnose a vehicle that flies but does not behave
Proof
Work that demonstrates this capability in practice.
Air-and-Water Autonomous Vehicle
AQUAD: a single vehicle that flies to a site, submerges, manoeuvres underwater and returns to the air, on one charge. Built against a brief targeting ocean worlds such as Europa.
Read the case study →NASA MINDS 2024 - Honourable MentionWireless Power and Data Transfer
Paired resonant Tesla coils beaming power and low-frequency data across a gap with no conductor between them, and the electromagnetic compatibility engineering needed to keep nearby avionics alive.
Read the case study →NASA MINDS 2024 - FinalistAutonomous Aerial Docking and Recharge
A heavy-lift carrier UAV acting as an airborne charging hub and data relay, letting micro-drones dock in flight to recharge, offload sensor data and borrow GPU cycles.
Read the case study →NASA MINDS 2024 - Semi-FinalistMorphing-Geometry Multirotor
A multirotor whose thruster pods pivot and slide on servo-driven rails, shifting from a wide-span cruise configuration to a compact footprint that fits through doorways and pipe racks.
Read the case study →US Navy research programmeNatural-Language Flight Control
A chat-to-fly interface for UAV operators: spoken or typed instructions translated directly into flight commands by a language model running on the aircraft, not in a datacentre.
Read the case study →With the Cal Poly Pomona Aerospace Engineering departmentTurbine-Powered VTOL Platform
A VTOL airframe driven by twin JetCat P60 micro-turbines instead of electric rotors: over 13 kg of combined thrust and fixed-wing cruise speeds, while keeping multirotor agility for vertical take-off.
Read the case study →