Kohler Z

Wisconsin Robotics - 2021-2025

I was heavily involved in Wisconsin Robotics starting at my first semester in UW-Madison. I started on the electrical team as one of the few members on the team after COVID-19. I had to get myself aquainted with the team and its practices very quickly, and there was no remaining electrical engineer to mentor me. I had already learned Autodesk EAGLE, so I was able to look at some of the designs of the boards that the graduated students had made for the rover as it stood.

The latest project I worked on was an automated optical produce grader for a local potato farm. The goal was to assist in finding defects on the potatoes as they were travelling down the production line and automatically track and kick them out of the line for seperate processing. The system used industrial machine-vision cameras to send high volume data back to a computer running our custom software.

We used various types of machine-vision algorithms and machine-leaning models to detect the defects on the potatoes. Given a large amount of training data from cameras placed above the line, we were able to create custom training datasets and use them to train our models on powerful local hardware. Once a defect was found we needed to track the potato accross the camera and kick it as it was falling through the air. I was lucky enough to be able to work with a brilliant team of engineers to bring this project from and idea into reality and it is currently in production.

Co-Op Project at Yaskawa

During my time as a student engineering Co-Op at Yaskawa, my main project was the upgrade of an old 1.5kW dynamometer to use the newest technology and be up to date with the rest of the lab. During the discovery phase, I realized that enabling the dynamometer to run at 3kW would not be too much of a cost barrier and would make sense for the workflow of the team. My supervisors gave me the go-ahead to proceed and I got to work in SOLIDWORKS designing all of the mechanical portions of the test stand.

During the summer after my Senior year of High School, I was given the opportunity to work with the UW-Platteville’s Wisconsin Applied Research Institute on a project to create a more robust and reliable data logger for SNOTEL sites. I took the project over from a previous graduate student and was tasked with taking the prototype and refining it to be more reliable and easier to use in the field. This was an ambitious project for me at the time, but I was excited to take it on.

Project for Platteville High School

My physics professor propositioned me and a friend to make this device that could be reliable enough and easy to use for my high-school’s pep rallies and assemblies

At the time I had been working more and more with my 3D printer, so I took on the challenge and designed the mechanical and electrical aspects of the device. I used ethernet jacks with crimp connectors to ensure there was little chance of solder joints decaying over time. The ethernet jacks were used to connect to the main hub which contained an arduino to do all the processing. The device was simple to use and started the sequence as soon as power was applied.

Team 171 - Cheese Curd Herd

My first official robotics experience was with my local FIRST Robotics team, FRC Team 171. It was a joint effort between Platteville High School students and UW-Platteville students who were our mentors. This is where I got my first experience with CAD, 3D printing, machining, programming, and electronics. Once I got the robotics bug, I was hooked and never went back. The team was very close-knit and I was able to make some great friends and memories.