undergraduate research assistant

• own the unity ↔ ros 2 integration layer for an autonomous pediatric wheelchair.
• design and build the human-robot interface used by pediatric participants.
• turn open-ended research goals from graduate supervisors into working, testable software.

• built a real-time bridge between unity and ros 2 humble - bidirectional pub/sub syncing urdf wheelchair models with slam occupancy grids.
• wrote dual-mode control: a virtual joystick for cmd_vel teleop, and a gui for publishing autonomous nav2 goals.
• designed a high-contrast, gamified human-robot interface for pediatric users with visual impairments, driven by the robot's real-time pose.

research taught me to work without a spec - to take an open-ended question, scope it into something buildable, and defend my technical choices to people who know far more than i do. i got much more comfortable reading robotics papers and ros docs and turning them into code.

i work under graduate-student researchers and alongside clinicians, so i had to learn to translate between robotics, software, and the real needs of pediatric patients. building something a child will actually use raises the bar on communication and care.