A rover built to work autonomously
The SSTA Lunabot project is a student robotics effort for the Lunabotics Challenge at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. My work centered on the robot's autonomous navigation and control systems, connecting software decisions to a physical machine operating in a demanding environment.
Where I contributed
I focused on the control-systems side of the robot: designing and implementing the navigation and control behavior that lets the rover act on sensor input instead of relying entirely on manual driving.
- Autonomous navigation and control logic in ROS2 and C++.
- Integration across the NVIDIA Jetson and ESP32 hardware stack.
- A robotics workflow that joins high-level behavior with embedded hardware.
The engineering surface
This project sits at the intersection of robotics software, embedded systems, and control engineering. The technology choices reflect that split: ROS2 for robot software, C++ for performance-sensitive control code, and dedicated compute and microcontroller hardware at the edge.
What I learned
I learned that robotics software has to be designed around physical constraints from the beginning. The most important part was thinking across ROS2, onboard compute, embedded hardware, and control behavior as one system.