Outstanding Student Projects from Udacity’s Robotics program!
Today, we’re pleased to share projects completed by three students from the Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program: Fernando Jaruche Nunes, Mithi Sevilla, and Nicholas Hortovanyi.
If there is one thing we know from hiring partners—and from all of the recruiters and hiring managers we regularly engage with—it’s this: they love to see the projects our students build. Just recently, we published a story about Eric Persson, who explicitly credited his portfolio of projects with helping him to land his dream job:
“I think a large part of how I landed the job was that I’d built up a portfolio in the program.”
Today, we’d like to share three projects built by students in our Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program. We chose these projects with the help of HaoYang Fan—Udacity’s Student Experience Specialist for our Robotics programs—who’ll tell you a bit below about why we chose each project.
Let’s get started!
Fernando Jaruche Nunes
This amazing “Search and Sample Return” project was recently completed by Fernando Jaruche Nunes. This project is modeled on NASA’s Sample Return Robot Challenge, which challenged teams from around the world to demonstrate a robot’s autonomous capability to locate and retrieve samples of different materials across different terrains. In our own Search and Sample Return project, students work in a simulated environment, using computer vision techniques to search for samples of interest.
HaoYang Fan says this project represents an important stage in a students’ robotics education, and he praised how Fernando approached the challenge:
“This project is a really useful learning experience as, with just a few lines of Python code, the student gets a chance to experience the three main steps in robotics: perception, decision making, and actuation. In his decision-making module, Fernando used a wall-following strategy in his project to navigate his rover, and implemented a rock sampling state to sample target rocks. In the sampling state, the rover would reduce its speed and align itself with any rock sample it perceived, allowing the rover arm to properly start the sample process.”
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Ready to “challenge” yourself to take your robotics projects to a whole new level? Enter the KUKA Robotics Challenge!
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Mithi Sevilla
Below you can see Mithi Sevilla’s “Pick and Place” project. In this project, she learned how to manipulate a robotic arm using kinematics and the Robot Operating System (ROS) — a framework for writing robot software used extensively by robotics professionals. In this project, students control a robotic arm with six degrees of freedom within a simulated environment, picking up an object from one location and placing it in another.
This is what HaoYang Fan had to say about Mithi’s approach to the project:
“Mithi had all her inverse kinematics calculations carefully laid out first, and then implemented the planner for the robotic arm. In her write-up, she clearly explained the trigonometric functions used with graph and code, which is very impressive. The robotic arm she controlled moved swiftly, picked up the object, and successfully dropped it in the target bin, following the path created!”
Nicholas Hortovanyi
Next up, here is Nicholas Hortovanyi’s work on the “Map My World Robot” project. This project focuses on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), which aims to build or update a map of an environment while tracking where the robot is in that environment. Students use a ROS SLAM package and simulated sensor data to create an agent that can accurately map the world around it.
HaoYang Fan explains how Nicholas successfully completed this challenge:
“Nicholas built the robot model from the ground up, and constructed the ROS program utilizing various ROS packages, including RTABMap, to accomplish the project’s mission. He navigated his robot and mapped the virtual world, generating a very impressive 3D map.”
Thanks to all of the students for allowing us to share their amazing projects! And thank you to HaoYang Fan for providing expert commentary. Projects like these are such a great way for students to showcase their expertise, and each of these students is setting themselves up for future career success, by providing clear and demonstrable evidence of their capabilities.
Stay tuned for the next project post, where we’ll feature even more of the incredible projects our students are building.
And remember, if you’re already a student in our Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program, or you’re about to enroll (now would be a REALLY good time to enroll!), then enter the KUKA Robotics Challenge today!
