Why did you choose to study at Illinois?

I planned on attending a university to pursue aerospace engineering. U. of I. was not only a top university for AE, but it was also in-state for me. Illinois was the obvious choice from the get-go, but it was my two best friends from high school who really sealed the deal for me, as they were both also accepted to Illinois for engineering. Seeing the opportunity to continue our adventures into college, we took it, and we are still my best friends to this day. My college experience would not have been the same without them.

Why aerospace engineering?

I've known since middle school that I wanted to pursue something that combined math, science, and creativity. When I took physics in high school, everything clicked, and I knew I had to be an engineer. But what kind of engineer? Well, I  happened to be obsessed with space. I was captivated by the idea of it being humanity's last frontier, and I spent my free time watching documentaries, reading books and staying after class with my physics teacher just to learn as much as I could. That passion naturally led me to aerospace engineering. It was the perfect blend of everything I loved, and it felt like the obvious choice.

What course or professor helped you most academically?

Taking AE 353: Aerospace Control Systems with Dr. Ornik during my junior year completely changed the trajectory of my engineering career. Up until then, aerospace engineering hadn't quite been what I pictured it to be. It was heavily theoretical and, while I found it interesting and useful, I yearned for the opportunity to apply it and see it in action. I finally got to do that in AE 353 where we learned the basics of modern control theory and applied it.

I loved the process of designing the perfect controller and guidance system for a quadcopter, and the theory behind it was very intuitive to me. Inspired, I began pursuing it outside of the classroom, hoping to explore more of the areas where control systems could be applied. Dr. Ornik helped me channel my interests by having me develop simulation software for AE 353. I began to experiment with it, creating autonomous cars, quadcopters, and aircraft, purely out of interest. That work eventually became part of the research tools used at the Learning, Decision, Control, and Autonomy lab, which is Dr. Ornik's research group. I was able to assist Ph.D. candidate Gokul Puthumanaillam in his research on robotic behavior forecasting by incorporating the simulation software into his work, culminating in a research paper titled "TRACE: A Self-Improving Framework for Robotic Behavior Forecasting with Vision-Language Models," which I was honored to coauthor.

From there, I secured the opportunity to intern at Draper as a Guidance, Navigation and Control algorithms and simulations engineer this past summer, where I got to learn from and work with industry-leading professional engineers in GNC. Now, I am returning to U. of I. to pursue my Master of Engineering in Autonomy and Robotics degree, where I will continue my research with LEADCAT and continue to learn, grow, and develop as an autonomous systems engineer. I found my passion in aerospace engineering thanks to AE 353 and Dr. Ornik, whose mentorship has meant the world to me. I am incredibly excited for the road ahead!

 

What projects helped you gain technical expertise?

For the final project of ECE 484: Principles of Safe Autonomy, I worked with a team of four other students to develop a fully autonomous car with the ability to estimate pedestrian intent. We were provided with some code for lane-following, but it was incomplete and insufficient, so my team and I pretty much built the car's autonomous systems from the ground up, which was an incredibly challenging, yet rewarding experience. My teammates designed the navigation system and software, as well as the vision-based pedestrian intent estimation, while I designed the car's planning and guidance systems.

For the navigation system, we fused lidar with vision to get a robust estimation of our surroundings in three dimensions. This allowed us to avoid collisions with obstacles such as cones and pedestrians. Then, using vision, we identified the lanes on the road and computed waypoints along the center of the lanes. We also used a machine learning model to identify cones that represented a zebra crossing if a pedestrian was determined to try to cross. These waypoints then fed into the guidance system I designed, where a finite state machine would determine which form of guidance the car would utilize to make its way to the waypoints. For example, if the cones were detected, the car would enter a parking state, where a parking guidance system was used to gently slow the car down as it approached the cones. While the car was following the course, it would enter a cruising state, where a velocity-adaptive guidance model was utilized to slow the car down as it approached sharp turns.

It was a fascinating project, and incredibly fun too. If you're interested, the full video with all the details on that project is available on Ruben Hernandez's LinkedIn page. Ruben was my partner on the project that designed the pedestrian intent estimation algorithm. It’s one thing to design and develop software, but an entirely different ballgame when trying to apply it to hardware, and I believe that was arguably the most important lesson I learned from that project. My absolute favorite part of the project that helped me to discover my passion was designing the guidance algorithms. I did a great amount of research on guidance algorithms for autonomous cars. Putting it all together in practice was incredibly exciting.

 

Describe a specific challenge you faced and how you resolved it.

In my junior year, I secured a summer internship as an engineering intern. In the summers prior, my internships were in the IT department of a finance firm and, while the work I did was heavily based in coding, data analysis, and software development, it wasn't related to aerospace engineering. So, securing an aerospace-related internship was a huge deal for me, especially as I would be entering my senior year following it, which meant I'd be entering the full-time workforce and would need technical engineering experience to find opportunities within the realm of aerospace.

Unfortunately, two weeks from the start of that internship, I received a call informing me that the summer internship program had been cancelled, and I would no longer be an engineering intern. This was heartbreaking, as I felt that my last opportunity to get the technical engineering experience I needed had been taken away from me, purely by chance. However, I needed technical engineering experience, and I refused to let the cancellation keep me from getting it that summer.

I immediately got to work contacting anyone I thought could help me find a new opportunity as an engineering intern for the summer. I sent countless emails, made a plethora of phone calls, set up numerous meetings. I even cold-called local businesses to see if they had a need for an engineering intern. I was hard set on finding a new opportunity and, regardless of what it was, I planned to make the most of it.

After about a week of reaching out to as many people as possible, two of my emails landed, the first of which came from Dr. Ornik. I had reached out to Dr. Ornik in hopes of possibly assisting him in his controls research for the summer. Luckily, he had an opportunity for me to assist him with some simulation work for the AE 353: Aerospace Control Systems course. The second email was from an employer I had spoken with earlier in the school year. I reached out to inquire if the opportunity for a summer internship was still available, to which he responded by offering to meet with me to discuss. After our discussion, he offered me a summer internship with his firm as an aerospace engineering intern.

So, all in the span of two weeks, I lost my internship, turned it around into a new aerospace engineering internship, and got involved in control systems research with Dr. Ornik. I carried that momentum through the summer and into my senior year, where I was able to secure a summer internship with Draper as a GNC algorithms and simulations engineer. I truly believe that, had I not lost my initial internship, I would not have been pushed hard enough to get to where I am now. I’m proud of the work I put in over the last two years, and I am incredibly grateful for the challenges I have faced.

Tell me more about your internships?

For the summers following my freshman and sophomore years, I worked at Calamos Investments as a software engineering intern in Naperville, Illinois, where I primarily developed Python-based data analysis and visualization tools for the investment teams. Although not strictly engineering, much of my technical knowledge within the realm of programming was developed there, and I learned common industry practices and data management.

In the summer following my junior year, I worked at DAC Engineered Products as an aerospace engineering technical research and development intern in Oswego, Illinois. I worked hands-on with aircraft components and research tools, including CMMs, optical interpreters, and PMI machines to reverse engineer aircraft components with high precision. I also produced CAD models and machinist blueprints, keeping in mind standard GDT practices and researching manufacturing processes to ensure feasible machinability. Much of my industry understanding and technical mechanical work came from DAC EP.

Finally, this summer, I interned at Draper as a GNC algorithms and simulations engineer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working on a number of strategic systems programs, enhancing navigation and guidance algorithms through simulation-based analysis. It has been, by far, the greatest experience I have ever had.

 

How did the pandemic affect your years at Illinois? 

The pandemic began in the middle of my junior year of high school and, honestly, it was a blast at first. I went home and my friends and I immediately hopped on video games, which we played constantly for the first few months. However, as the pandemic continued into my senior year of high school, I realized that my ability to not only study, but also learn, had significantly degraded.

I felt it the hardest in my first semester at U. of I. when I took my first courses in aerospace engineering. I studied for only a single day leading up to my first exam, which was for chemistry, convinced that two hours of studying would be enough to do well. As I'd find out, it was not nearly enough, and my exam score reflected that with a grade of 40 percent. I was completely distraught, and I began to think that maybe I was not cut out for aerospace engineering.

However, I turned it around over the semester, and I began to study weeks in advance for multiple hours at a time, and I made it through the semester. That single event showed me how detrimental the pandemic had been on my study abilities, but I coped by working harder than I ever had before and surpassed even my highest expectations.

 

How did you decide what to do after you graduated?

Toward the middle of my first semester of senior year, I was already pretty deep into GNC and autonomous systems. I knew I loved it, and I really wanted to learn more of the theory within the field, as well as work with the robotic equipment that U. of I. has. However, the aerospace engineering curriculum is rigorous, and I was only afforded four technical electives, two of which needed to be AE courses. Most of the robotics and autonomy courses are within the ECE or CS departments, so that meant I'd only be able to take two robotics courses before graduation.

In order to obtain the knowledge and experience I desired, I chose to pursue my Master of Engineering in Autonomy and Robotics at Illinois this year. The entire curriculum is designed for students to get as much experience with robotics and autonomous systems as possible, including working with full-size autonomous cars, drones, aircraft, and simulation software, which is exactly what I was hoping for.