Robotics engineer.Perception, localization and control on real hardware.

PR-TCN: physics-residual motion prediction for airships

A docking controller needs to know how a blimp will react to a gust before it happens. The prior predictor handled one vehicle in straight flight. I extended it to 17 manoeuvres, five vehicle sizes and four wind models, and replaced the purely learned model with a frozen analytical rollout plus a gust-conditioned TCN that learns only the residual.

The finding I care about most is a negative one: the most accurate analytical prior is not the best one to learn on top of. Of ten architectures across eight held-out shifts, the physics-residual model is the only one that beats the baseline on every shift.

Supervised by Pascal Goldschmid, examined by Jun.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Aamir Ahmad. Builds on arXiv:2511.19135. Airship photos: Flight Robotics and Perception Group (iFR, University of Stuttgart) / Perceiving Systems (MPI-IS), from Perception-driven Formation Control of Airships (Price, Black, Ahmad) and the Airship-MPC repository. The 1.0 is the top grade on the German scale (A).

15-state EKF for smartphone GNSS + IMU fusion

A sensor-fusion library that turns a phone's raw GNSS fixes and IMU stream into vehicle kinematics at IMU rate: velocity, tangential acceleration, heading, pitch, roll (lean angle for motorcycles), yaw rate and corrected position. What makes it work in practice is the automatic calibration of the phone's arbitrary mounting orientation into the vehicle frame, estimated from an ordinary driving session through gravity and velocity alignment rather than a rig. A later engagement on the same system removed the slope effect from the acceleration estimate, which the client describes in the reviews below. Runs on recorded files or on a live stream.

On a recorded driving session, the fused velocity tracks speed derived from consecutive GPS fixes with r = 0.95, and heading converges within five seconds to a median error of 0.4° (RMSE 1.3°) against GPS course over ground, using the fixes as reference because the phone's own speed field is a placeholder with corrupt spikes.

Figures from the repository's own input and output files.

Autonomous navigation & path planning for the Unitree Go1

Developed navigation and path-planning for the Unitree Go1 quadruped as part of a fully funded workshop at the University of Stuttgart's IAS: waypoint tracking, obstacle avoidance and autonomous mobility in ROS and Gazebo, using an artificial-potential-field planner. Improved the robot's ability to navigate dynamic environments and contributed the results to a DAAD-supported multi-robot cooperation project alongside TurtleBot 3 and Franka Emika Panda platforms.

Vision-guided 2-DOF ball balancing platform

A ball is balanced and driven along arbitrary trajectories on a tilting plate by an STM32F103C8T6 closing the loop on positions from an OpenCV pipeline. Three controllers are switchable at runtime (PID, PV and LQR), with a Kalman filter for velocity and an EMA on the control output. Gains are tuned live over serial while the plate is running.

Zmanim alarm clock: full firmware for an ESP32-S3 touch display

Firmware for an alarm clock that understands zmanim, the halachic times derived from sunrise and sunset. A NOAA solar calculator and a bundled world-city database (coordinates, elevation, time zone) compute the day's times on-device, so an alarm can be set as "10 minutes before Shma" and it moves with the calendar; alarms carry day-of-week filters and offsets, with a test suite covering offset maths, 12/24-hour conversion, time-zone handling and edge cases.

Around that engine: up to eight labelled alarms and a countdown timer, an LVGL 8 touch interface at 60 FPS, MP3/WAV alarm sounds through the board's I2S DAC, a battery-backed RTC, settings persisted in NVS and a sub-5 mA sleep mode, with the ST7789 display, CST328 touch, PCM5101 audio and PCF85063 RTC drivers written against ESP-IDF 5. A Windows LVGL simulator runs the same UI on a PC for development, and a hardware-abstraction layer let the shared UI and alarm code be ported to the ESP32 "CYD" board.