Vishal Rajendra Kumar

My first encounter as an engineer where I utilised engineering principles to build a formula student race car for Pegasus Racing, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India. I worked as a Suspension Engineer in the vehicle dynamics team and as an Electronics & Instrumentation Engineer taking care of the wiring harness and instrument cluster. We participated in the SUPRA SAE-2015 Formula Student competition, where the team bagged the 13th overall position out of 121 teams.

This was a research project funded by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. Our team which included Suriya and me, led by Mruthun designed and fabricated two hybrid solar collectors.
I still deeply cherish the fabrication days where we rapid-prototyped custom drill jigs for drilling precise holes in aluminium cross-section bars. In addition to the mechanical fabrication, I also worked on the design and development of a stepper motor control unit for position tracking of the sun using image processing techniques.

I designed an Automated Guided Vehicle dedicated to handling discarded automotive parts' packaging boxes at the Vehicle Assembly and Engine Plant of Ford India Private Limited, Chengalpattu, India. The AGV's chassis was designed to accomodate the towing of plant's existing payload trolleys. The main objective was to keep the cost at minimum as the payload trolleys were only carrying recyclable waste cardboard boxes. A small scale prototype was developed whose trajectory could be monitored using RFID beacons from a base station. The project was a part of my bachelor thesis.

I worked in the perception team of "leTHIdrive", Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, for the Audi Autonomous Driving Cup 2018. This was my first encounter with AI and Autonomous mobility. I worked on the object detection algorithm which classifies objects (car, pedestrians, emergency vehicles) to respond appropriately in an autonomous setting. The platform was a 1:8 scale Audi Q2 with Intel Core i5 and NVidia GeForce 1050 Ti 4GB as the computing hardware. The scaled vehicle was also equipped with an autonomous driving sensor suite. (Front & Rear Cameras, Ultrasonic Sensors, Front 2D LIDAR, IMU, Wheel Encoders).

One of the things I love doing - scavenge & build, during the short break after my internship at Audi AG, Ingolstadt, where I dealt with different aspects of Autonomous Driving, I was deeply motivated to deploy a Visual SLAM algorithm using a Raspberry Pi for transmitting live image data to my laptop computer where I intended to do the processing. What started as a fun side project, soon took a serious turn as I decided to integrate the SLAM onto a robot. Though I did not have success with putting the SLAM algorithm together, I ended up building a remote-controlled vacuum cleaner which has a floor mopper attached to the rear and a vacuum inlet at the front.

Converted a regular cake decorating turntable into a 360° Photogrammetry turntable capable of automatically triggering the shutter of an android mobile's camera via Bluetooth. The turntable was required as a part of another project where 3D models of objects had to be generated using "Structure from Motion" (SfM) algorithms. The motor mount and the coupler for the stepper motor powering the turntable were designed and printed using a desktop 3D printer. The logic control unit divides 360 degrees into a predefined number of steps and triggers photo capturing between each step.