Opportunities

Interested in working with us?

We have several hardware platforms and ongoing projects. UTD graduate and undergraduate student are welcome to apply.

Pick a project/position you interested in from the list below and email Dr. Summers at Tyler.Summers@utdallas.edu. Please include your major, year, the project of interest, a resume, and any background experience you have.

If you are interested in some other control/robotics-related project, feel free to reach out to us and include a short one paragraph summary of the project you have in mind.

Current Projects

Autonomous RC Cars

At CONLab, we have two autonomous RC car platforms: COMO and Super COMO. The platforms have onboard computers and various sensors that enable them to perform autonomous driving. The vehicles are designed to operate in two modes: centralized and decentralized. In the centralized mode, the vehicles rely on a motion capture system to tell them where they are. In the decentralized mode, the vehicles can operate outside of the lab confinement using the on-board sensors and computer.

Super COMO

The following positions/projects are available:

  • Centralized Operation:
    • Graphical Control Center Design
    • Real-Time Vehicle Visualization
    • Centralized Commands (stop, go, lane change, …)
    • Behavioral Planning (traffic intersection handling, queuing, lane changes, …)
  • Decentralized Operation:
    • Mapping and Localization
    • Perception and Machine Vision
    • Behavioral Planning
  • General:
    • Simulator
    • C++ Controller
    • Optimization-Based Control (e.g. NMPC)
    • Website and Documentation Maintainer

Autonomous Quadrotors

At CONLab, we have have two types of quadrotors: 1) micro aerial vehicles and 2) medium and large size aerial vehicles.

  1. Micro aerial vehicles do not have an substantial compute or sensors on-board and thus usually rely on an external system to aid their operation.
  2. Medium/large aerial vehicles usually have on-board compute and various sensors that allow them to operate autonomously independently.
Crazyflie MAVs

The following positions/projects are available:

  1. For micro aerial vehicles
    • Drone Show Design
    • Migration to ROS2
    • Heterogeneous System (building larger drones and adding them to the swarm)
    • Testing Available Sensor Decks
    • Data Visualization
  2. For medium/large aerial vehicles
    • Drone Design and Assembly
    • Autonomous Operation

Ball and Beam

One of the simpler platforms that we have at CONLab is a basic ball and beam system where a horizontal beam is controlled by a single motor which tilts it to try and balance a ball at the center of the beam (or any other point of interest).

The following positions/projects are available:

  • Reinforcement Learning (RL)
    • Gym environment design
    • RL controller training
Ball and Beam