Projects & Research
Science fair projects, 10 hours/week, 17 weeks/year, from 2018 to present.
Autonomous Wildfire Suppression Firefighting Robot
A model prototype firefighting robot that moves, senses, and extinguishes fire in rough terrain. I was the concept creator on this one, start to finish. The embedded system runs a sensor fusion algorithm that combines YOLOv8-based visual fire detection with LiDAR, ultrasonic, and IR camera data.
Using Deep Learning AI to Enable the Safety of Self-Driving Cars
A purely software-based project comparing two CNN architectures for classifying road signs, to explore safer autonomous driving.
VGG-16 likely overfit — its 138 million parameters exceeded what the dataset needed. Both models held similar testing performance, though, which suggested good generalization overall.
Towards Sensor Fusion
A multimodal sensor fusion project to precisely locate objects in the field of view, combining three different sensing methods into one confirmed reading.
LiDAR measured reflected laser pulses for precise object maps, ultrasonic sensors measured reflected sound waves, and infrared sensors detected objects well even in direct sunlight. I built a test bed to calibrate the XY location of an obstacle and triangulate its position using all three readings together.
Ultrasonic Eyes
Tested an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor's accuracy for self-driving car applications, evaluating how temperature, materials, and environmental disruptions affected its readings.
Flying High with Drones
My first engineering project, entered as a middle schooler — an early exploration of drone flight and control that placed 1st in Physics at the Santa Cruz County Science Fair.