Achievement

Trainee Carlos Oroza completed his project of designing and building a fleet of robotic sensors to track water flow and contaminant spread. Last summer, he completed the final production run of over 100 sensors. He has since performed several field experiments in multiple regions of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. This summer, Carlos is planning a media event where he plans to demonstrate his technology live to the general public. Building on last year’s research, he implemented a new control scheme for the waypoint guidance controller in the sensors. It’s based on a method called extremum seeking to tune the controller gains of the robot. Last period, he finished a simulation of this approach and now has implemented it on a physical sensor. He simplified his sensors to make them more accessible to novice users by replacing the custom electronics with a smartphone. Carlos got the phone to control the robot from one GPS waypoint to another with feedback from the compass in the phone.