RoboNav @ RoboJackets, Georgia Tech

Before joining the team proper, I was onboarded through the Mini Rover Challenge (MRC), where I designed a custom chassis that had to fit a strict 30"×30"×30" envelope while keeping the whole robot under a $500 budget. Once our subteams finished their pieces, I led final integration — tracking down and resolving CAD interference errors between the suspension, arm, and chassis assemblies to get everything to mate properly.

The onboarding process also taught me the team's standard parts and where we source them (McMaster, Misumi, and similar vendors), how preliminary and detailed design reviews work, and covered mechanical fundamentals like shaft constraining, power transmission elements, inverse dynamics, and machining practices.

Now on the full team, I'm optimizing the chassis's differential bar, which levels the chassis by pushing and pulling the left and right wheel legs. My task is reducing the current two-plate design down to a single plate: I'm working through hand calculations for normal and shear stress and a basic von Mises check against yield strength, and will follow that with FEA and topology optimization in Ansys to cut the weight further.