Experiences

ROB 450 - Capstone: Creating a 3D Printable Gearbox

August 2025 - December 2025

During my second to last semester, I had the incredible opportunity, and responsibility haha, to do my capstone project. This experience is definitely one I will not forget, and am excited to share!

Robotics capstones are a project given to a group of students by a sponsor. I got to work in a team of five, with four other girls, and our project was sponsored by one of the robotics labs at the University of Michigan: ARCAD Lab. They tasked us with a project to create a 3D printable gearbox for a QDD motor and to create a demonstration that showcases the power of the gearbox.

Throughout the semester, my team and I spent our time designing, printing, testing, and iterating the 3D printable gearbox. We had to address concerns that occur with changing the material from metal (traditional gearbox material) to 3D prints, such as strength and reliability. With this in mind, we researched different methods to help strengthen a print and looked into different print-able materials.

In addition to focusing on the 3D print, we spent our time designing a hopping leg that hops around a gantry in a circle. To make this work, two teammates and I focused on learning the moteus code base and how to write code for the motors we had purchased. We created code that simultaneously controlled both the hip and knee motor on our robot leg, allowing it to hop.

TechComm 350 - Accessible Recycling

January 2025 - May 2025

A requirement for robotics majors is to take a technical communication class before one graduates. I personally love the fact that my department emphasizes that knowing how to communicating ones work is as equally important as the work one does. I took my technical communication course my second semester my junior year, and thoroughly loved the experience.

In the course we spent a lot of time learning how to emphasize the main point of your essay and how to make compelling slides that work to elevate your presentation. To practice, we were split into groups and given a semester project of creating a pitch of a new innovative way to improve recycling. We had to research, design, and communicate our idea over the course of the semester.

After ideating, my team decided to pitch a device that attaches to trash cans and recycling bins that teaches elementary school students what materials can and cannot be recycled. This idea came form the fact that a lot of recycling gets thrown out because of a lack of knowledge of the general public. We wanted to create a lasting, scalable change to decrease the amount of recycling ending up in our landfills.

We spent the semester looking into human-robot interaction and recyling, figuring out how to make a design that was kid-friendly, and finally ended by presenting to our class about how we would create this robot.

ROB 498 - Autonomous Vehicles

January 2025 - May 2025

I was extremely excited to take ROB 498: Autonomous Vehicles, as autonomous vehicles are a growing market and something I'm very interested in. In groups we chose autonomous vehicles we wanted to simulate movement path planning with.

My group and I choose to use the robot from my research lab - a 4 legged robot with wheels allowing for fast and precise movement. In class we researched other wheel legged robots and how they simulated movement. We eventually decided to use a URDF of Boston Dynamic's Spot (with added wheels) as our starting point for simulation. We used this model to visualize how our robot would move in 3D space, demonstrating RTR movement paired with A* path planning.

At the end of the class we got the opportunity to do whatever we wanted as a last project for the class. We decided we wanted to make our simulation jump over boxes. Creating a jump action sequence took work, and more pouring over past research, but eventually we found and tuned a sequence that worked. Our robot could now leap (like a dog) over boxes. This was a very rewarding experience, and one I particularly enjoyed.

ROB 320 - Robot Operating Systems

January 2025 - May 2025

ROS and ROS2 are crucial parts to modern robotics, and are the main way that robots are run. Thus, I was excited to take this class to learn how to use ROS2 commands and become more fluent with the operating system.

I was surprised to learn this class wasn't about learning ROS2 commands, but instead creating a simplified ROS system. Throughout the semester I had the experience of creating publishers, subscribers, and topics, allowing messages to communicate between nodes. We then took this implementation and did mapping and movement of our robot.

While I was surprised by the content, I think that by creating a simple ROS, I have an even better understanding of the operating system.

ROB 330 - Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

January 2024 - May 2024

I was super excited before taking SLAM Robotics as I was excited to code for robots. However, over the semester I had my course I learned that coding robots is vastly different than coding for my computer science classes. Problems I had were not necessarily solvable through a google search, we suddenly didn’t have any of the debugging tools we had in my EECS classes, and most differently, in class we learned the high level algorithm without going into detail about each step of the code. Through the semester I learned how to code in a much more realistic environment, where the answers are not right out of reach and improved my grit.

We worked in teams of 4 in the class to split work. In this process I practiced my systems thinking, improving how to split work and balance things between our teammates. I also practiced trusting my teammates to do their own thing. Finally, while working with a team, I practiced empathy. Everyone had other courses and other things to balance with their time, and we all had to be understanding of how much or little time one could put into the project.

For our final project we had to do something new and creative for our robot, which pushed my creativity. We ended up repurposing our robot to become a cat that knocks objects off of tables. I would normally not have had to think of something like that in my classes, but this course forced me to improve my creativity.

Atombot: Swarm Robotics and Collective Intelligence

January 2024 - June 2025

Since January I’ve had the opportunity to work on the Atombot: Swarm Robotics and Collective Intelligence project under Professor Y Z at the University of Michigan. My cohort of classmates were the first group to work on the Atombot project, and with that came a lot of excitement, but also some difficulties.

Our excitement drove us forward to creating a project proposal and got my team to start designing and building a robot with 4 leg-wheels. Through this process, I noticed a lack of leadership and decided to fill that hole. I learned how to organize meetings, excite my team members, and help fill gaps in knowledge on my team.

Along with organizing the subteam, I had to work on my systems thinking, as robots inherently pull from so many areas of engineering. Planning timelines and purchases required thinking ahead which was another skill that I developed over my time at Atombot thus far. Finally, as with any robotics project, I had a chance to improve my teamwork. Splitting work fairly and balancing expectations of everyone on the team are things I’m always striving to improve, and I was lucky enough to have another chance to practice it.

ROB 311 - How to Make Robots and Make Them Move

August 2023 - December 2023

I felt extremely under qualified for this class when I started. I felt as though I was lacking background in many areas and experience with the tools we were using. Due to this, I was forced to connect with many more of my classmates than I do in most of my classes. One of the people I worked with was my teammate. Together, over the course of the semester, we built a ball-bot, a robot which balanced on top of a basketball and drove it around. We spent our time going through the entire engineering process and pulling skills from various areas. We designed, fabricated, and built the robot. In addition wired, coded, tested, and tweaked our robot to improve.

From this class I learned a lot about communicating and how important a community is. If we didn’t work with other teams, none of us in the class would have done well. In addition, we improved our risk management skills. We had to decide between a guaranteed 80% or a chance at 90% depending on how we configured the robot.

REUSE - Research Experience for Undergraduates in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon

May 2023 - December 2023

The REUSE program was my first research experience. My research was creating and evaluating the possible applications of a configuration-based performance fuzzer. I expanded the JQF fuzzing library on github by creating a new performance fuzzer, which compared the effectiveness of a program with different configuration settings. The fuzzer would create “random” inputs and assess the difference in runtimes between two configurations. Based on that, it would then decide whether or not to create more inputs similar to the input that was just run.

From this experience, I learned more and got more comfortable with git repositories. In addition, as my first research experience, I learned more about what research is. I learned how to find and read research papers effectively, communicate with a professor about progress, and what problems I should solve on my own vs as my professor, among other things.

It was also learning how to communicate in a group and reporting to someone. I learned how to give regular updates, the best way of communicating information, and what content to leave in or cut out of an update.