Meet the Team
We are a group of 4th year Mechatronics Engineering students passionate about Robotics! Read more about us below!
Benjamin Schnapp
Ben is the manipulation lead. His work allows Florence to smoothly extend and retract the basket. Ben developed a flexible arm control interface, allowing Florence to switch dynamically between joint space and cartesian maneuvers. Ben also integrated end-effector orientation constraints into the arm motions. Most notably, Ben greatly improved the smoothness of arm motions by resolving a deeply nested bug in the existing arm code. This resulted in noticeably smoother maneuvers. Outside of school, Ben enjoys hiking and skiing.
Felix Wong
Felix is the perception and human interaction lead for Nightingale. Over the project, Felix has made vision upgrades to the Kinova MOVO base by integrating an industry preferred Intel Realsense camera and added a tablet interface to allow Florence to easily communicate with patients. Felix’s work allows for Florence to dynamically react to the patient to make their stay in the hospital comfortable. Felix is the team resident foodie, bringing the team around to local restaurants when he is not working on Florence or playing badminton.
Lyndon Tang
Lyndon is the system integration lead. Lyndon was a major contributor to the mechanical designs for Florence's basket as well as the camera tablet mount. In the early stages of the project, he had a significant role in talking with nurses and creating the communication reports expressing the team's goals and progress. In the background, he worked on some experimental features for the manipulators to make them more interactive like payload weight estimation and collision detection. Outside of engineering, Lyndon enjoys skating and playing the guitar.
Younes Reda
Younes is the autonomous navigation lead for the project. His work enables Florence to navigate dense hospital floors, avoiding both static and dynamic obstacles. Younes also brought up a simulation environment in which the team tested it's software prior to deploying on the real robot. Beyond engineering, Younes enjoys playing soccer and practicing Jiu-Jitsu.
