Graduate Research Assistant

During my graduate research position, I developed several robot user interfaces and researched interaction between robots and humans within the collaborative manufacturing context. Outside of research, I contributed to lab infrastructure and processes, e.g., maintaining centralized robot description/configuration repository.

These projects focused on exploring how human workers collaborate with cobots. Find a more detailed writeup in the Notable Projects section.

Authr focused on building an authoring environment for human-robot work. CoFrame was designed as a training environment for cobot operators. Both are documented further in the Notable Projects section.

For this project I worked with several colleagues outside of the lab (in Human Factors and Optimization) to investigate cobot effectiveness when deployed on a variety of manual work activities; contributing robot capability analysis as inputs into our allocation algorithm. We performed this study during COVID lock-down, using a pre-existing dataset of human work from ONET.

My contribution was on rating collaborative robot capability (using a decision flowchart designed by a colleague and me). These ratings were derived from a significant literature review into collaborative robots at the current state-of-industry.

In addition to formal research projects, I contributed to lab infrastructure and processes. I worked to maintain a centralized robot description and configuration repository for robots within our lab. I developed extensive documentation and bringup code for Universal Robots UR3e and Microsoft Hololens. I also developed and updated the Robotiq gripper ROS driver under various conditions (e.g., support for serial tunnel on UR3e).

In addition, it was expected to assist colleagues with their user studies, technical development, and paper writing.