Hallett's Creations
Engineer | Propmaker | Painter
CAPSTONE PROJECT: HAND REHABILITATION EXOSKELETON (WIP)
Rehabilitation robotics is an area where robots are developed to aid humans in the recovery of medical conditions. In this project an exoskeleton is being developed to help a patient recover from conditions that has led to partial motor neuron damage in the hand. These conditions may include stroke victims whose hand motor functions have been weakened. It is my goal to take this base exoskeleton mechanism and build upon it to create a system where both hand gripping force as well as exoskeleton linkage position is controlled to aid a patient in hand rehabilitation tasks whilst improving the current design to improve user experience and its consistency in its performance. All hardware and software design aspects of the project was developed by me to show the various skills I have gained during my bachelor's degree.
Autonomous security device
This is a small projected developed during my time in Canada studying at The University of Western Ontario at the start of the covid 19 pandemic. This is an Arduino project in which the device would track a human's movement in an environment . The device uses ultrasonic and PIR sensors to map out and detect a change in environment. The idea was to have a webcam attached on top of the servo head so the camera can autonomously follow intruders in it's environment. Due to the covid situation the device was made only using parts found around the house and cheap components. My aim is to take this concept further one day and experiment with computer vison technology for object detection .
Ant Colony Optimization
As well as developing hardware centric projects a very important area of interest of mine is AI. During my time studying simulation and modelling techniques I had the opportunity to explore the practical applications of AI in a project devised by me. I decided to study a fairly well known path finding algorithm that uses the simulated behaviors of an ant colony. The foraging behavior of ants is the main focus of the algorithm to find the shortest path between the ants original position and the location of a reward . In this multiagent technique virtual ants explore a virtual environment (a graph) and excrete pheromones on paths that lead to a reward. As more ants venture down the shortage path the more pheromones are dumped on the path. The path with the highest concentration of pheromones after some time will be the shortest path to the nearest reward. This algorithm has many variations and can be found in many path finding tasks. I developed a java GUI animation to show the ant colony in action as well as a c program that uses the algorithm to find solutions to the travelling salesman problem.
Autonomous car and obstacle avoidance
My second year project consisted of an open ended objective which was to take a chassis of a RC car and make it autonomous. This was a team project which I managed, in the end our project used a GPS module for localization and would find its way to another GPS location via a Bluetooth input. The project used a hierarchical behavior method to decide when to head towards the GPS goal location and obstacle avoidance. I developed an ultrasonic sensor module and integrated the obstacle avoidance and wall following behaviors via the use of a mbed microcontroller.
PID Circuits
As someone with a great interest in control theory there has been a number of times where I have implemented a tunable PID controller. Here are two examples of applying a PID controller to control the angle of a motor shaft in respects to a user set reference (by pot) as well as including a way to tune PID parameters. One approach uses a embedded microcontroller where the control aspect has been implemented using software. The other approach creates the PID terms via the use of different amplifier circuits ( difference amp, low pass and bandpass filters). These exercises were made to show understanding of control theory and to explore the effects of each part of a PID controller.
Prop and Costume Fabrication
During my spare time I dabble in prop and costume making. I've created a range of projects over the years leading to a growing social media following and a variety of commissioned pieces.
