Santosh Rao Sripathy Rao

Motivated and driven Robotics and Automation enthusiast currently pursuing MS in Mechanical Engineering specializing in Mechatronics at the Northeastern University, Boston. Experienced in the development and simulation of Mobile Robots and Multi-Robot Systems using MATLAB, Simulink & Simscape, and Robot Operating System (ROS). Proficient in the use of SolidWorks and MATLAB for mechanical design and simulation.

I recently worked as a Mechatronics Engineer Co-op student at Retail Business Services LLC with their Innovation Lab. As part of an interdisciplinary team, I designed, developed, and tested a Minimum Viable Product to automate the testing of Point-of-Sale systems commonly used in retail. For this, I developed control algorithms for Servo motor-driven Electromechanical Systems such as a gantry, elevator, and multiple arm & gripper mechanisms using Python. I also created robust APIs for each subsystem to enable fast function calling and switching between tasks. Further, I performed rigorous failure testing not only on these APIs by deploying the code on a Raspberry Pi 3B, but also on the mechanical components to ensure repeatability, precision, and accuracy of the system. Based on the results of this meticulous testing, I implemented effective design changes to seamlessly integrate the subsystems.
My graduate research aimed to study and analyze the various forces acting on the Aerobat robot during its flapping motion. To this end, I designed and 3-D printed a custom passive end effector for the Kinova Gen3 lite 6R serial manipulator to house a 6-axis force sensor and mount Aerobat onto the sensor. I created multiple test trajectories for Aerobat using a higher order spline generator with set waypoints and deployed it to the Kinova Gen3 lite. The sensor data obtained was a measurement of the magnitude of deviation of Aerobat from its desired trajectory and was used to fine tune Aerobat’s controller using a supervised learning model.
As an undergraduate senior, I designed and simulated a decentralized four-robot system developed as an alternative to conventional AGVs used for holonomic material transfer of large irregular objects. Utilizing SolidWorks, I designed a custom turntable for a Jetson Nano driven Waveshare robot. Further, I led the team in designing and simulating a manually tuned PID controller algorithm for trajectory tracking in Gazebo 9.0 and ROS Kinetic and perform global path planning in a known environment using A* search algorithm.

I’m currently pursuing my Masters in Mechanical Engineering with a concentration in Mechatronics from Northeastern University. My degree involves coursework on Control Systems and Mechatronic Systems enabling me to employ conceptual knowledge in complex electromechanical system development. For my graduate project, I worked on Aerobat - a bat inspired robot designed to navigate in and inspect remote and confined spaces. As part of this project, I designed and fabricated a visual and geometric feature-filled test bed to aid depth estimation using a monocular camera mounted on Aerobat. I determined the exact shape, color, dimensions, and other parameters of these features based on the lighting conditions and the working distance of the camera. To validate the design, I modeled the test bed on Gazebo 11.0 and ROS Noetic and simulated a wide array of real-world conditions that the robot may encounter. To test the performance of the ORB feature detection and matching on the images obtained from the simulation, I developed programs with MATLAB’s Image Processing Toolbox. Ultimately, this was used to improve the efficacy of the test bed.