Missouri S&T Mars Rover Design Team

Lead Electrical Hardware Architect  |  marsrover.mst.edu
The Missouri S&T Mars Rover Design Team (MRDT) was established in 2012 to compete in the University Rover Challenge (URC) hosted by The Mars Society. URC expects rovers to perform a number of tasks in the southern Utah desert in conditions analogous to those that would be expected in and around colonies on Mars.​
Duties include managing, training, and mentoring a subteam of engineering students; managing integration of multiple electrical and nonelectrical subsystems; and design, fabrication, and testing of custom PCBs for communication, power management, and digital/analog sensing applications.

LIDAR Based Navigation System for the Blind

Mike Miles, Josh Jetter  |  The 52nd International Telemetering Conference, 2016
A common issue faced by people who are blind is the difficulty of navigating and traveling through unfamiliar outdoor and indoor environments. The current state of the art solutions to this problem consist of very expensive guide dogs and simple canes for obstacle detection. The space has seen few successful commercial technology solutions. The team proposes the development of a LIDAR based navigation system with auditory feedback which would allow the blind to navigate in unfamiliar environments and perform basic obstacle avoidance. The proposed solution would be a high-tech, lower cost solution to traditional guide dog based navigation.