Robert De Los Santos' Porfolio

Object Recognition using opencv and python

In this project, I created a program using python and opencv to use optical recognition to describe objects on the camera using text in a box and speech. From the program you can see it recognized a person, cat, banana, orange, and various books.

Lunar Soft Vine Robot

Within NASA L'space proposal writing certification, I served as Principle Investigator to write a proposal to solve the task of exploring lunar lava caves for the Artemis mission. Our project was called the Lunar Soft Vine Robot for subsurface Exploration. Though our team worked hard to find a feasable solution to explore lunar lava caves on the moon, our mission was not awarded the task. However, I learned a lot leading the team through researching the task, solutions, making contacts with subject matter experts, assembling and assigning tasks to the team, constructing a time line with feasible deliverables and goals, and tallying the bill of materials to achieve the project. This is the abstract of our project. A thorough exploration of the lunar subsurface is necessary to find the resources needed to maintain a permanent human presence on the moon. To fulfill the goals of NASA’s technology roadmap TA 4: Robotics and Autonomous Systems (4.2.2 Below-Surface Mobility and 4.3.6 Robotics and Autonomous Systems: Manipulation: Sample Acquisition and Handling), a team of students proposes the use of a soft-bodied vine-like robot. State-of-the-art lunar rovers function effectively on the moon’s surface, but they face many challenges in subsurface exploration, such as mobility and body damage. These challenges are partly due to the design constraints of a rigid robot. Soft vine robots are a technological leap forward in design to undertake the task of exploring the subsurface here on earth. They have the ability to grow distances underground, extending only at the tip while keeping the majority of the robot body stationary. Its soft body construction allows it to be flexible, durable, and maneuverable underground. These characteristics will make the soft vine robot an excellent addition to NASA’s robot exploration team. Our purpose is to use the soft vine robot technology will be adapted for use in NASA’s Artemis missions. A student team will build a prototype to test the suitability of materials, tools, and components needed for the robot’s success. From this project I gained my proposal writing certification from NASA and the LSpace Academy.

NASA spaceapps hackathon challenge

This project was my first Hackathon I participated in. It was the Nasa Space Apps Hackathon where I was tasked to work with people I never met before to solve a real world problem. Here we created an app in three days, made a working prototype, and presented it to NASA science/engineer judges panel. If selected a angel investor would fund the project. Our team tried to address the spot the fire challenge https://2018.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/volcanoes-icebergs-and-asteroids-oh-my/real-time-fire-app/details/. We took the task of trying to solve evacuations from wild fires here in california by creating an app called pyromatics that showed users where they were relative to an active fire, emphasize evacation zones, and used crowd sourced reports to generate evacuation center and gave status updates via rss feed. The app intergrated google maps and geo-location API. Though we made a valiant effort, we were not selected as recipient of the award. From this experience, I learned how to work with strangers to complete a task, my skills at website building vastly improved, and it also taught me that I can rely on others.

NASA Community College Aerospace Scholar

During my time as a Nasa Community College Scholar, I was one of the lucky few to be Selected to travel to the Nasa Ames Research Campus in Silicon Valley for an onsite tour and a student project consisting of other students from around the country. Though the project consisted of making a lego robot, the approach was using nasa methods to complete a simulated mars rover mission, from planning the mission, working as team and assigning deliverables, and executing the mission to collect, rock samples. I was part of the engineering team to design an efficient rover to collect samples. During the week, the whole experience was amazing, It was the first time I had ever went to an onsite Nasa site. I got to see one of largest wind tunnels where they test everything from parachute deployment to aerodynamics of vehicles, the exobiology lab, and a cockpit simulator. Here I made lasting friends with students and I also got to have lunch with Nasa engineers. One in particular I met was a NASA safety engineer, who had a hawaiian t-shirt with sail boats on it. I happen to mention that I built a sailboat and we got into a whole discussion about sailboat building and design and how Nasa Ames Research had a sailing club. This is one of my favorite experiences becoming an engineer.

Virtual lock on FPGA board

In this project, I used a FPGA to construct a digital lock with VDHL. The lock had four buttons where a three-digit code was used to unlock it. If the correct secret code 0-3-2 was entered, the LED LD0 on the FPGA board would light up, if an incorrect code was entered the LD7 led on the board would light up. Using this design, the state machine algorithm, diagram, and VDHL code was developed and I was able to create a functional digital lock in simulation and also on a FPGA board. Overall, this was an interesting project because it contained many parts including two submodules from the main VDHL code which was entered in vivado and debugged. The testbench was created in a Questa simulation. The final part was testing on the FPGA itself from vivado once again. The final lock opened when the correct code was entered and remained locked when the correct code was entered.

Downcounter on breadboard

In this project, I made a sequential circuit which used flipflops and a 555 timer. The 555 timer ic generated pulses to down count starting from the binary number of 15. That counted down to zero. The leds represented outputs of each binary number with a lit led being 1 and off being zero. The project was first simulated in multisim then created on the breadboard. It was a fun project seeing how the flipflops worked and how a timer can be made from only a couple of components.

MARS dowsing mission PDR

Within NASA L'space Preliminary Design Review Certification, I was head engineer in a NASA training project to design a mission to mars to explore for possible sources of water. Within this task I worked with other students from around the US to build an entire NASA mission using nasa guides, research, and training to plan the mission. The students had different specialities resulting in teams split into their prospective strengths. I headed the design of the mars probe and descent vehicle and engineering of it because of my solidworks and 3d printing experience . Ultimately we settled on a design inspired by NASA research of a large inflatable ball probe to traverse the landscape of using martian wind power as a source of propulsion. The electronics would be powered by a small nuclear battery which powered a water sensing probe, an air compressor, sensor, gyroscopes, air valves, and sat coms, and motors to adjust the rotation of ball as it rolled around the surface of mars. The unique design allowed it to survive the entry and descent onto mars and did not require a lot of complicated motors to traverse the planet. I designed the probe and descent vehicle using solidworks cad software. The PDR covered a summary, project evolution, science value, and descent and lander criteria, activity plan, and conclusion. You can contact me for the overall plan. Overall, it was fun to research, spitball designs, and work as a team to accomplish this exercise of creating a PDR of a NASA mission.

Multisim AM modulation

In this lab, a circuit was created in multisim to demonstrate amplitude modulation. An envelope detector was added to the circuit which was used to detect the AM signal. Here the output of the circuit was graphed and displayed two waveforms, one displaying the envelope and the other displaying the higher frequency component of the detected signal in figure 11.

MATLAB sinc wave

Three Phase Inductor Motor (Asynchronous Motor)

In this lab, simulink was used to create a simulation of a three phase inductor motor (Asynchronous Motor) and measured/recorded its characteristics. A table of measured characteristics is displayed under the schematic, along with graphs of Efficiency VS Load Torque and the Line Current Vs Load Torque. I included the matlab code to construct the data visualization of the simulation. Overall, this was an interesting lab seeing the effect of load torque on the characteristics of the 3-phase induction motor.

With his solidworks certification, These are various solidwork designs Robert has produced.