Through innovative control strategies and more sophisticated hardware, research teams at MIT are constantly improving the range of manoeuvres of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Small scale UAVs are however still constrained by the fact that their environment must have enough free space for them to avoid making contact with any surface. We are therefore attempting to drastically improve their abilities by designing a control capable of including intermittent contacts in both its planning and feedback stages. The control this project will yield could for example allow a small drone to rapidly change its direction by bouncing off a wall.

I have worked with MIT’s Robot Locomotion Group last semester. This experience familiarized me with tools such as trajectory optimization algorithms and feedback system models that will be utilized in this project. This past summer, I worked for Palantir Technologies where I was able to contribute to large scale projects, learn Linux performance tuning and prototype an aerial photography application as part of a weeklong project I took charge of.