Projects
What building a CanSat taught me about systems engineering
The parafoil was only one part of the problem. Building a CanSat showed me how interfaces, decisions, tests, schedules, and logistics determine whether a multidisciplinary system actually comes together.
How much battery does a drone need to fly home?
When an ArduPilot quadcopter is told to return home, how much battery will the trip cost? I trained neural networks, trees and a linear model on 349 simulated flights, and the biggest gains came from telling them how fast the drone really flies home.
CanSat: Bringing an egg back from space with a paraglider
How we navigated flexible-wing aerodynamics, deciphered literature nuances, deduced missing inlet angles from photos, engineered millimeter-precise Kevlar rigging, and ran drone descent tests to fulfill a demanding CanSat mission requirement.
How to explain orbital decay to a linear regression
·13 mins
A satellite in low orbit is slowly falling, and there is a classical formula that predicts it. I wanted to know whether the simplest model in machine learning could do better, and the answer turned out to depend entirely on what I chose to tell it.