Welcome
I am Ian Ferguson and this is my website. You can find out more about me, see some projects I've worked on or just look at some pictures. I hope you enjoy what I have to show you.
I recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Masters in Robotics. Over the course of the year I accumulated quite a few new projects to add to my collection. My thesis was on developing a flight-minimal coverage planner for quadrotor helicopter and ground robot working together. Coverage path planning involves sweeping a known map with the sensors of a robot. Often ground robots cannot reach all areas of a map with their sensors due to obstacles like tables, benches and other tall objects. My thesis focused on pairing a ground robot with a helicopter that can ride on the ground robot's back to allow areas that were previous unreachable to be sensed. The algorithm I wrote creates a path for the helicopter to follow that involves flying between points, taking off, landing on the ground robot and piggy-backing the ground robot in order to minimize flight time. I used a genetic algorithm to solve the traveling salesman problem and to find an ordering through the points of interest. This was followed by a flight-minimizing heuristic based A* search that is guaranteed to produce better results than the naïve alternative. I simulated the results using a simulator developed by a fellow student at the University of Pennsylvania. Check out some of the pictures below.
If you think this is cool check out some of my other projects here.
