VivZhou
I'm a second year Master's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering student. I studied Mechanical Engineering in undergrad at
UC Davis and also minored in Computer Science. My engineering interests include mechanical design, control systems, and
robotics. To get a brief overview of my skills and experience, please take a look at my interactive resume below. This is a brief overview of some key projects that I have undertaken in my undegraduate and graduate career.
Please click on the visuals to open up a description that illustrates my projects in greater detail.
For more details about my technical skills and previous coursework, please view my resume above. Send me a message to get to know me better.
Hello!
Who I Am
To the right, you will find my extracurriculars and hobbies.
Resume
To forego the complexity, a copy of my resume can be downloaded by clicking the icon to the left.My Work
What I found that I lacked in my undergraduate education was more courses tailored towards the other facets of mechatronics:
electrical engineering and computer science. I'm grateful to have been able to take a Graduate Electrical Engineering Robotics course
in which we were tasked to create a two-robot system. The system is composed of a mobile robot that will gather three objects of
our choosing with an end effector and carry them to a staionary robot. This stationary robot will accept or refuse the objects based
on certain characteristics (shape, color, sound, etc.). For my project, I utilized color since a color sensor would easily be able to
detect and differentiate different colored objects.
Another project I undertook during my graduate career was a simulation of an agricultural robot. I found this class to be
one of my favorites as I am definitely a visual learner! I learned about basic kinematic behavior of different vehicles
and how ideal movement varies when introducing real world characteristics such as slip and skid. This laid the foundation for
my understanding of pure pursuit control and robot dynamics. In this final project, I utilized my newfound knowledge to
have an agricultural robot autonomously navigate a nursery of trees and use a LiDAR (simulated) sensor to identify and record the radius of
the trees and their position, so that we can know when they are ready to "harvest." I had to use path planning with different
headland maneuver techniques to traverse the field. I utilized a median filter to correct the noise in the simulated LiDAR sensor
to retrieve more accurate data. Finally, I also simulated this in ROS with my partner as an added bonus to visualize the
entire program in 3D.
Any Questions?