Career Summary
Space Electronics The Forward Technology Solar Cell Experiment (FTSCE) which is the majority portion of the fifth Materials on the International Space Station Experiment (MISSE5) was installed on an external truss of the International Space Station (ISS) during the STS-114 shuttle flight. Our group designed, built and tested the electronics/software for this experiment package which included current-voltage measurements for 36 solar cells, as well as, sun position, sun power and temperature measurements. The electronics are designed to communicate through a PCSAT2 radio link to transfer data to ground stations while simultaneously storing up to two years of data in flash memory. Our group also built the Mars Solar Array Technology Experiment (MATE) and Dust Accumulation and Repulsion Test (DART) for the Mars 2001 Lander. These experiment packages also characterize solar cells, but on the Martian surface. Also included in the MATE and DART experiment packages are a dust microscope, spectrometers, sun position sensors, temperature sensors and dust mitigation experiments.
Optical Strain Measurement The laser speckle-strain measurement system uses laser illumination to scatter light from structural fibers producing a speckle pattern. Movement of the speckle pattern is used to determine strain non-intrusively in the very narrow fibers. We developed an optimized hardware correlator that uses a state-of-the-art fuzzy-pattern comparator and gate array technology to implement a hard-limiting acquisition system that calculates the hamming distance between two speckle patterns at real-time rates. This original approach to tracking the motion of a speckle pattern yielded an inexpensive yet powerful dual-channel correlator with a maximum throughput of 730 2048-point correlations per second for each channel. Consequently, real-time laser speckle strain data acquisition became a reality, providing a non-contact method for observing strain in structural fibers and wires even at elevated temperatures.
Fuzzy logic control for optical instrumentation: We built an active long-term Fabry-Perot etalon stabilizer. Using three fringe patterns produced by the etalon and a novel optical arrangement in conjunction with fuzzy-logic techniques that model the decision process of an experienced operator, allowed us to actively align and thereby indefinitely stabilize a Fabry-Perot Etalon
Robotics: I produced miniature robotic platforms to experiment with sensor fusion in remote, inaccessible locations. We also use the platforms to experiment with autonomous interactions within swarms. I also participate as a mentor for high school students for the FIRST Robotics competitions. During the 1999 competition, I created a clone of the controller share with teams that wanted to experiment during the off-season.
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