Company: Defense Technologies, Inc.
Role(s): Program Manager, Systems Engineer, Software Engineer

The Ranlo 1 UGV was developed at DTI in 2008-2009. It was an internal research and development (IRAD) effort to develop a medium scale tactical UGV for police and first responders. The Ranlo 1 was built using a stock 6-wheeled ATV chassis which was modified to accomodate vehicle actuation, power supply & distribution, safety critical systems and computer control software. I was the lead engineer on the project, leveraging my previous experiences in the design, implementation and testing of numerous UGV systems in the past. I also served as the Program Manager, managing a small team of engineers to execute on my vision and meet the needs of our internal customers. Software systems on board the UGV were developed using the OpenJAUS JAUS Toolkit which allowed for rapid development of a JAUS compatible UGV with minimal development overhead. In August 2009 the Ranlo 1 UGV was debuted at the AUVSI Webster Field demo and participated in a perimeter intrusion and takedown scenario.

Company: Defense Technologies, Inc.
Role(s): Robotics Engineer, Software Engineer

The Go-C Camera system is a two-axis gyro-stabilized pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) unit. Its small size (approximately 5" in diameter) make it a great component for a variety of medium and small scale robotic platforms. The hardware and software for the system was developed at DTI. I worked in two main areas of the system, algorithm development and software development. The unique placement of the INS unit (on the end effector) and the fact that the camera imaging plane was not placed at the center of rotation made the solution of the inverse kinematics quite complex and challenging. I also worked to integrate a JAUS based command and control infrastructure into the system.

Role: Co-Founder & Developer

OpenJAUS is the world leading open source implementation of the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS). In August 2006, OpenJAUS.com was launched with the support of a complete JAUS SDK developed at the University of Florida in support of our DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 activities. Since then, OpenJAUS has grown to support JAUS software developers around the world. In 2008 OpenJAUS 3.3 was released, a fully RA 3.3 compliant toolset written in C/C++. Today OpenJAUS is actively developing next-generation JAUS SDK based on the latest service oriented architecture (SOA) appraoch. This new toolset is fast and flexible, implemented to take advantage of the Eclipse IDE's Ecore modeling language and Acceleo code generation tools. As a Co-Founder and Leader of the OpenJAUS project, I have gained significant knowledge leading open source efforts, managing limited resources, and developing APIs and code frameworks for other application developers.

Role: World Modeling Lead, Smart Sensor Architecture Developer, System Engineer 

DARPA Grand Challenge was a driverless vehicle competition sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in October 2005. The off-road race consisted of 132 miles of desert terrain outside Primm, NV. Team CIMAR from the University of Florida was one of the 23 finalists to participate on race day. The NaviGATOR, UF's robot, traveled 14 miles before GPS errors caused a failure in the vehicle's navigation systems. I was involved in the vast majority of the NaviGATOR's software architecture including development of a JAUS-based software SDK for the team, development of the Smart Sensor architecture and creation of two psuedo-sensor programs to aid vehicle navigation based on a priori mission data.