RIT Robotics - Alan Meekins

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Alan Meekins

2nd Year Computer Science Student,

Rochester Institute of Technology

Treasurer: RIT MDRC

My resume

alan [DOT] meekins [AT] gmail.com

alm2220 [AT] rit.edu

My Website

Interests

Autonomous robotics, computer vision, embedded software development, control systems, agile project managment.

Current Projects

Image Processing Gallery

I have started collecting photos that will serve as good image processing test images I will post them in a gallery to aid MDRC members and others in the creation of computer vision algorithms for use in robotics.
View Gallery

Sensor Documents

This is a collection of documents related to some of the sensors used on our robots.
View Documents

Extensible Robot Core

Throughout the 2006 - 2007 school year I began work on a software infrastructure capable of meeting the control needs of middle to large sized autonomous and tele-operated robots. In early 2007 Ziyan Zhou, as well as numerous other MDRC members, joined me in my efforts and the Extensible Robot Core(ERC) was born. Presently ERC can utilize a number of sensors connected either directly or remotely between several computers to gather information about the robot's operating environment to map and traverse it safely. ERC is by design a very modular system which makes it capable of scaling to meet the needs of different robots and to work reliably regardless of the hardware architecture of the target computer.
ERC development is progressing very quickly and we are now at ERC v2.0 which will fully support a modified version of JAUS. The ERC v1.1 tree is still under development as well for robotic applications that do not need full JAUS support.
ERC project in more detail.

Competitions

Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC)

For more information about this see: RIT Robotics Club IGVC, and Official IGVC website.

Mini-Grand Challenge

In preparation for IGVC, we are competing in the Mini-Grand Challenge, at Penn State Abington. The date of the competition is March 31, 2007. See the Competition page.

Firefighting Competition

This upcoming fall(2007) I will be working migrating ERC to an embeded computing environment in properation for the Trinity Firefighting Competition.

Work Experience

Capital One

I interned at Capital One for two summers during high school. My first summer I worked in a division called USCO and EO IT. The team I worked on was responsible for creating reports on IT department projects to aid in project management and accounting. My second summer I worked in Telephony IT on a software project called Freedom of Speech(FoS). This is where I was first exposed to Lean and Agile development practices. Though I had no programming responsibilities as part of FoS I enjoyed every moment at Capital One and consider it invaluable experience.