Frank Regal - Porfolio

Enhanced HRI for Robotic Repairs

An augmented reality application built to visualize point cloud, image, and location data obtained from a dual arm mobile manipulator. Users can use mixed reality interactions to place occlusion volumes to mask areas in the visualized point cloud from being coated for scenarios where the mobile manipulator plans to coat surface rust identified. (IEEE IROS 2023 Workshop Submission)

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AR & Robotics

Practical LfD for Mobile Manipulators

This robot agnostic Learning from Demonstration (LfD) technique enables users to perfrom a single demonstration to define a manipulation contact-tack for mobile manipulators in unstructured environments. Using a model-based, Affordance Primitive approach, mobile manipulators can navigate, plan, and execute a manipulation (e.g. turn a wheel valve) in any direction with any angle, outside the provided single demonstration trajectory. Our studies on the system found these demonstrations allow mobile manipulations to have a 96% completion success rate of prior unknown object manipulations. (IEEE IROS 2023 Publication)

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AR & Robotics

HRI for Large Multi-Agent Teams

Scalable with 50+ autonomous agents, this AR-based Human Robot Interaction (HRI) framework enables users to easily localize, supervise, and command a heterogenous fleet of robots using an augmented reality headset. (IEEE RO-MAN 2022 Publication)

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AR & Robotics

Rapid Item Identification w/ Haptics

For UT Austin's ME 397 Haptics and Teleoperated Systems class with Dr. Ann Fey, my team and I developed a vibro-tactile haptic device that mounts to the HoloLens 2. The device provided sequential vibrations to the users head to help locate robots and other items of interest faster in their environment. Development was done with Unreal Engine 4, C++, Raspberry-Pi, and a HoloLens 2.

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AR & Robotics

Remote Teleoperation via AR-HMD

This project strives to develop new methods with augmented reality devices to allow operators to confidently and effortlessly control dual-arm remote mobile robotic manipulators. (IEEE IROS 2022 XR-ROB 2nd Place Prize)

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Robot Autonomy

Self Driving Car (Full SLAM Dev)

For UT Austin's CS 393R Autonomous Robots class with Dr. Joydeep Biswas, my teammate and I created a complete nav-stack for autonomous navigation of an Akermann steering car. Debugging and tuning were performed in simulation. Developed algorithms were deployed on a physical (scaled model) car. Localization performed with a custom 2D-LiDAR particle filter and a custom RRT algorithm was created for planning.

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Robot Design

Magnetic Inspection Robot (Full System Dev)

Tasked with creating an alternative method to inspect boiler tube walls for corrosion to eliminate the need of a human to enter into a hazardous environment, I developed a modular, wirelessly controlled, 3D printed, magnetic inspection crawler from the ground up . Chain driven by two DC motors, the crawler was able to crawl up and down the 120 ft tall vertical boiler walls. Dished magnetic wheels were created to adhere and align itself to the tubes in focus. The entire crawler was developed in house and cost just under $2,000 for total R&D

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Robot Control

Motion Planning & Control

For UT Austin's ME 397 Algorithms for Sensor Based Robots class with Dr. Farshid Alambeigi, my teammate and I created algorithms to control a Kuka Quantec 6DOF robotic manipulator. We used skrew theory to model and control the arm. At the end of the class we were able to control and plan trajectories for robotic manipulators. Impedence, admittance, hand-to-eye calibration, hand-eye calibration, virtual fixtures, point-cloud registration, pivot calibration algorithms and more were all developed from scratch.

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Mechanism Design

Quick Release Four-Bar Mechanism

The first prototype of this Quick Release Mechanism was designed to aid researchers in the computer science department at UT Austin attempting to perform the water bottle flip challenge with a robotic arm. To perform this challenge an end effector needs to have a quick release mechanism to rapidly release the water bottle from the robotic gripper at the right time. My partner and I worked to develop a linear translation mechanism that can slowly close (clockwise drive) and rapidly open (counter-clockwise drive) via a DC motor that would be easily intergratable on a robotic arm.

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Robot Control

Robotic Latency Compensation

For UT Austin's ME 397 Digital Controls class with Dr. Dongmei "Maggie" Chen, my team and I created a predictive digital control to compensate for latency found in a specific AR human-robot teaming application (AugRE) that we built in my lab (NRG). We used advanced control theory to apply a few different techniques such as lead compensators, pole placement, linear quadratic regulators (LQR), and Smith predictors to compensate the system for both constant and variable delays over a network.

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AR & Robotics

AR Scanning and Mapping

For my capstone at Drexel University, my team and I developed an AR tool to help construction workers easily map, scan, and superimpose building models on a spatially mapped environment. The DRACOS system integrated a HoloLens 1 AR device with a custom DJI F450 drone. The system allowed the user on the job to deploy a drone and interact with a 3D model of the physical job site. The HoloLens 1 applictaion allowed the user to import and overlay any 3D models into the application.

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Robot Control

Teleoperation via Shadow Arm

For Drexel University's MEM 455 Robotics class with Dr. James Tangorra, I developed a scaled down 5R robotic manipulator that was tasked to perform a simulated disaster recovery clean-up effort. To control the robot I created a 3D printed shadow arm that was a model of the physical robotic arm. The operator teleoped the real robotic arm by using the shadow arm that mapped potentiometer readings at each joint to physical joint positions of the real arm to perform the clean-up task.

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