Design of Controls Systems Teaching Assistant

Skills Used: ROS, Python, PySerial, PID Control, State Space Control, Hardware Maintenance, PyQt, Arduino

I was a Teaching Assistant for Design of Controls Systems for over a year. I was able to dive deeper into the concepts through teaching them to other students. The main areas of control that we focused on were the following:


Hummingbird GUI

One of my favorite projects that I have worked on for this class is to create a GUI that communicates with the Arduino connected to the hardware used for the class, called a "hummingbird." Previously, the class used ROS to send data back and forth from a PC to communicate updates in gains and reference values. In an effort to remove the need for students to learn ROS and control techniques in one class, I developed this GUI that replaced the ROS implementation. This involved digging deep into serial communication and I created a customizable GUI that is easy and intuitive to use for students (see below). This project also included cleaning up a significant amount of legacy code that was no longer necessary and made it more difficult for students to understand what was taking place in the code.

Also, a part of the job was to perform maintenance and trouble shooting on the hardware. It was not uncommon for a hummingbird to stop working without a lot of detail on why or how. I was responsible for debugging and getting the hummingbird back online so students could complete class assignments.