EEERover

The budget Curiosity rover

EEERover was an assigned Year One Project at Imperial, which involved the building of a rover designed to be able traverse unfamiliar terrain and identify foreign materials, possibly for the use of exploring extraterrestrial planets. The project drew parallels to the Curiosity Rover. Beyond the simple requirements for remote-controlled locomotion, the rover also needed to be able to detect and identify minerals based on the waves the minerals emit. For this, four different detectors for Amplitude Modulated (AM) radio waves, infrared waves, ultrasonic waves, and magnetic waves were implemented.

My focus for this project was ensuring minimal use of retail-purchased components. Instead of simply throwing together a bunch of commercially available sensors and amplifiers, I took the opportunity to design these from scratch. Almost all of the components used were available from our department’s laboratory. This meant analogue design for amplifiers using discrete transistors as well as sensor design using wires, capacitors and photodiodes.

Despite this minimalistic and low-level design, the final product performed exceptionally. During its testing day, it was one of the only two rovers which managed to identify all the minerals accurately in the simulation environment. And this required only about £5 – a meagre 10% of the allocated budget provided! Overall, the project offered an interesting challenge by purposefully limiting myself and allowed me to demonstrate and consolidate my knowledge attained during the first year of the course. With this incredible experience and insight gained from this mini-project, it’d be interesting to work on the $2.5 billion USD Curiosity rover.

• Date: October 2016 - June 2017
• Category: Analogue and Software Design

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Fuzzy Friends

A full-stack webapp commercial solution

Fuzzy Friends was a self-initiated design project to test my understanding and abilities gained from venturing into self-taught full stack web development. Fuzzy Friends is designed to be a web application for an imaginary high-end commercial pet-lovers social network. (Disclaimer: The values and information posted is meant to be for fun and demonstration purposes only.) Fuzzy Friends includes a full front-end web application, including a minimalistic and clean design for browsing and reading about the wealth of furry friends available. It also has a backend allowing for a secure user database, comments and easy updating of posts.

The application uses a MongoDB, Express, NodeJS (MEN) stack to implement the “full stack”. Whilst the stack is admittedly limited and old, it acts an easy stepping point to delve deeper into the world of web development. Express acts as a lightweight framework with multiple plugins to allow for the implementation of multiple functionalities (templating, authorizations, to name a few). The result was then deployed on Heroku. Overall, the project was meant to be for fun and prove to myself that I have picked up the essentials to creating such dynamic webapps as these designs can easily be scaled and repurpose for different potential clients. In fact, this awesome website was self-designed and was actually considerably easier since it is just a static application!

• Date: Summer 2017
• Client: Yours Truly
• Category: Web Development

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MSBot

Automating food dispensing.

MSBot was my submission for Imperial College Robotics' FoodHack hackathon. Originally a 4 man group, it was whittled down into a solo project before we even begun due to unforeseen circumstances. Despite this, I soldiered on alone and endeavored to learn something from my first ever hackathon. The objective of the hackathon was to come up with something in line with the progress of robotic restaurants: in the aspect of service, food preparation or simply the customer's experience itself.

I targeted the aspect of service, specifically with regard to yogurt chains which can have multiple employees involved in adding the different portions of a single parfait. This was clearly a process that could be automated and would therefore greatly reduce waiting times. (When yogurt chain llaollao first opened in Singapore, people queued for hours!)

The idea was simple: use compartments in the machine (MSBot) to hold different ingredients. Then, by the means of a webapp, or mobile app, customers could design their own yogurt based on their choices of yogurt, fruits, crunch, sauces (clearly I'm a yogurt fan). The app would then show the amount to be paid, which can be done through an integrated payment system. For the health conscious, the app would also show the calorie breakdown for each ingredient as well as the total. After payment, one can simply wait for the mechanics of motors and pumps to work their magic and voila, a delicious, customized yogurt parfait!

Through the process of automation as well as incorporating UX in the design of MSBot, I had sought to usher in a magical age of robotic restaurants.

• Date: January 2017
• Client: Finish
• Category: Identity

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Buddy Shelf

Intelligent item organization.

Project still under construction, hence no supporting image.

Buddy Shelf was the product of my second hackathon at the annual Imperial College Hack. At this hackathon, my group mates and I were first exposed to the wondrous progressions of ML and AI technology by Microsoft's Computer Vision. As a group, we decided to leverage this development and seek to better the lives of the less fortunate.

We ventured to come up with an intelligent shelving system which could be voice controlled and also possessed image recognition to process and organize the stored items. This would allow the disabled personnel to easily acquire and organize their belongings efficiently. To accomplish this, my teammates implemented the voice control using Amazon Alexa while I worked on the mechanical system. This consisted of a belt as well as a system of motors to deliver and store the items.

Even though we completed the mechanical systems, we failed to crack the voice control interface of Alexa within the time constraints and hence left the project unfinished. Today, having worked actively with voice control during Project YOGI, I am interested in reviving this project and realize the initial aspirations of the project. (I am also motivated by a personal desire to easily keep my room organized as well!)

• Date: January 2018
• Category: Artificial Intelligence

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YOGI

A personal healthcare robot

Project YOGI is the result of my second-year project. YOGI was a self-proposed project and is essentially a personal healthcare companion, targeted at alleviating the problems the elderly face, such as chronic illnesses, dementia and even depression stemming from lack of attention from relatives. YOGI does this with the following features:

• Full range of motion
• Dynamic facial expressions
• Natural speech AI
• Provide diagnosis from a list of symptoms
• Medication reminders
• Measurement of vital signs
• Facial recognition
• Remote control and live feed streaming
• Accompanying mobile app
• Battery life of over 4 hours

Demonstration video!

The inspiration behind YOGI originated from a childhood favourite movie of mine: Big Hero 6, which featured a lovable elastic robot capable of providing healthcare assistance. The movie was however, set in a futuristic world which appeared far ahead of ours. Even so, the idea of having a robotic healthcare companion seems pertinent in the world today, with the aging population facing chronic illnesses, dementia and depression stemming from a lack of attention from busy relatives. As I watch my own grandmother slowly begin to forget me, I was motivated to bring a piece of that advanced fictional world to the present reality.

Moving forward, I intend to design my own body for YOGI, customized to have a greater range of motion as well as allow for greater interaction. An investigation into soft robotics could also be possible, to reduce any chance for injury due to the hard body of typical robots. The current implementation uses an open source design from Robo de Alegria. It also uses several cloud services (Google Speech, Google Vision, Dialogflow, etc.) resulting in a latency that is evident. Future development would thus go into developing a local solution, improving response times. This project would thus occupy most of my free time for the time being. Lookout for updates!

• Date: October 2017 - Present
• Category: Robotics and AI

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Interactive maps

Using OpenStreetMaps to create maps

GUI still under construction.

My foray into mapping technology began as part of my internship with Innosparks, a startup incubator by ST Engineering. During this stint, I contributed to an ongoing project primarily as a software engineer, due in part to logistical requirements as well as my own interests.

Summarily, the project aims to leverage existing technologies to innovate a comprehensive mapping application that extends beyond what current ones have to offer. I was tasked with improving the overall User Experience by looking into the OpenStreetMaps (OSM) API to implement a more integrated mapping application.

In this process, I was first told to investigate libosmscout, a low level C++ library that allows developers to make use of OSM data in their applications. Even though this library took a relatively short time to unravel, I became intrigued by the idea of contributing to the project by improving the overall UX. Hence, I enquired if I could further my contribution by re-designing the Graphical User Interface (GUI). To do so, I began learning to use the Qt framework since the libosmscout library provided support for it. The result was a beautiful application capable of cross platform usage thanks to the capabilities of the Qt framework.

This internship allowed me to experiment with UX/UI design, albeit admittedly only the surface of it. Beyond that, I also gleaned a bit of insight into the intricacies of mapping and tracking algorithms, and appreciated their complexities as I worked with them to optimize the application. Overall, I am glad for the internship to have allowed me to continue pursuing my interest in software development and continue consider a future with this path! (Of course, I did ask to design part of the electrical hardware of the system, allowing me to utilize a small part of my EEE background! And of course, soldering jobs...)

• Date: Summer 2018
• Category: Software development

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