Projects

Coastal Mariculture

Aquaculture is the fastest growing protein source, and the US has a ~$1.8 B USD import deficit, even though the US coastal regions could produce much more. We’re researching co-robotics systems (people and robots working together) to monitor water quality in coastal regions.

Students in this project program robotic systems, integrate components for custom sensors, and get to take their work into the field for testing. We use the robot operating system (ROS & ROS2), Docker Containers, and try to model good software practices.

Automated Software Testing

Testing the software that interacts with robot sensors and actuators is really hard – harder than testing software alone! This project examines methods to find bugs faster with less resources.

Robot Representation in Software

Robot software contains representations of a robots geometry — where the different parts are in space and how their hooked together. This can be hard to developers to modify and comprehend. This project seeks to find the key barriers specific to robot system developers so we can build tools to help developers build better software faster.