I will be working with a soft-bodied robotic fish, with a silicone- based tail that flaps like that of a real fish. It also has rigid, rotating fins to provide pitch and roll control, but these will eventually be replaced by flexible actuators similar to the tail. The final goal of the project is to implement full 3-dimensional locomotion using soft actuators, which is inherently challenging because of their complex dynamics and almost infinite degrees of freedom. Another challenge will be doing sensor fusion and accurate pose estimation underwater with the limited computational resources of a small microprocessor.

During my sophomore year I got a lot of experience with embedded development during a UROP with the MIT Space Systems Lab. I’ve also started working on my own quadrotor autopilot, through which I’ve been exposed to some controls and state estimation.