I worked at MIT ACL as a lab assistant from January to May 2020 under Professor Jonathan How.

My research involved:

• Conducting testing and debugging of the lab simulator and expand it from a quad-rotor to a hex-rotor, which is the lab standard vehicle
• Incorporating wind and air dynamics by combining the simulator code with air dynamics code drawn up by another lab member.
• Incorporating blade flapping effects into the simulator to factor for the elimination of disymmetry of lift.

I left my position a lot more comfortable with C++, ROS and Linux systems. I also learnt key logical testing techniques, such as setting checks for variables that might sometimes have null values and are inputs for other functions which would cause unprecedented results down the line.

A challenge I faced while working on this project was the fact that I was putting together several very independent codebases- the drone simulator code that models flying a quadrotor simulator but does not account for physical properties like wind turbulence and aerodynamic factors that would play a role in real life, and the code that models mathematical Dryden models for turbulence and blade flapping. Working around this involved a lot of debugging in C++ and ROS, and digging into functions to find ways to manipulate them to generalize better, and be easily maintainable in future.