RE-HOBI362 Rachel Hoffman-Bice, PhD

Skills & Stack

What I work with, and the pages that show me using it

Design

Machine & mechanism design

Designing the mechanisms that make a machine work: linkages, drives, bearings, couplings and exact-constraint interfaces.

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GD&T & tolerancing

Turning an error budget into drawings a machinist can hold: fits, tolerance stacks and geometric tolerancing.

Design for manufacture

Designing parts around how they will actually be made — including parts I then machined myself.

User-centred design & concept development

Shaping concepts around the people who use them: sketch models, concept reviews and user studies.

Analysis

Error budgeting & precision engineering

Apportioning a machine's allowable error across its subsystems, then checking it with homogeneous transformation matrices (HTMs) and measurement.

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Structural analysis & FEA

Stiffness, deflection, fatigue and finite-element analysis of load-bearing structures under the loads they will really see.

Dynamics, simulation & optimization

Dynamic models, simulation and optimization, from legged robots to optimal racing lines.

Build

Machining — manual & CNC

Manual and CNC machining of my own designs, held to the tolerances I set for them.

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3D printing & additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing for prototypes and test hardware: Stratasys J35 Pro (PolyJet), Formlabs (SLA) and Bambu Lab (FDM) printers at Medtronic, and Markforged composite printing in my PhD research.

Electromechanical integration

Integrating motors, actuators, drives and their controllers into working machines.

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Electronics & soldering

Hand-soldered electronics and protoboard builds, on nearly all of my school robotics projects.

Controls & software

Embedded & microcontrollers

Microcontroller interfacing and real-time I/O with Arduino and BeagleBone.

Robotics & sensing

Sensors & machine vision

Integrating sensors and machine vision: Kinect, RealSense, OpenCV and image processing.

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Test & quality

Test, verification & metrology

Designing the experiments and measurements that show what a design actually does.

Failure analysis & root cause

Tracing field and test failures back to a root cause, with the testing and reporting to back it up.

Medical devices

Medical device design & IEC 60601

Medical device design under IEC 60601 and FDA-style design controls.

Surgical robotics

Mechanical and controls engineering on Medtronic's Hugo™ robotic-assisted surgery system.

Process & communication

Requirements & functional requirements

Writing functional requirements from what a machine has to do, and tracing design decisions back to them.

Agile / SAFe product ownership

Scaled Agile (SAFe) product ownership: prioritising and running a team's backlog.

Technical writing & publications

Peer-reviewed papers, theses and technical write-ups that explain the engineering behind a result.

Stack

Software & languages

ROS

Robot Operating System, for robot software integration.

Robot Raconteur

Middleware connecting the RAWHIDE robot software.

OpenCV

Computer vision library used for on-robot image processing.

ArUco fiducial tags

Fiducial tags tracked with OpenCV's ArUco module for peg position and orientation on the 2D rig.

AprilTag fiducial tags

AprilTag (tag36h11) fiducial tags tracked with a calibrated camera for peg position and orientation on the 3D WinchBot.

GPOPS-II

Optimal-control solver used for minimum-lap-time trajectories.

GRBL

Motion-control firmware on the desktop CNC router.

Hardware & electronics

Arduino

Microcontroller boards for sensing and real-time I/O.

BeagleBone

Single-board computer driving DrumBot solenoids in real time.

ODrive

Brushless motor controllers for the three-winch prototype.

Dynamixel

Smart servo actuators used for arms and carriages.

Kinect

Depth camera tracking a person air-drumming.

RealSense

Depth cameras for teleoperation and mapping.

Solenoids

Electromagnetic actuators striking a real drum kit.

80/20 aluminium extrusion

Modular aluminium framing for quick, stiff structures.

Drives & mechanisms

Mecanum drive

Omnidirectional wheels that let a base translate sideways.

Brushless drive

Brushless motor drive for the powered suitcase.

Differential drive

Two driven wheels steering by speed difference.

Stepper drive

Stepper-driven motion for a repeatable stage effect.

Series elastic actuation

A spring in series with the actuator, for compliant legged motion.

Cable-driven systems

Manipulating a payload through cables that go slack under compression.

Rack and pinion

Tooth-driven linear motion across a rail network.

Kinematic coupling

Exact-constraint interfaces that repeat to microns.

Elastic averaging

Many compliant contacts averaging out individual errors.

Methods & domains

Ant Colony Optimization

Metaheuristic search for good disassembly sequences.

Computational geometry

Working directly on CAD meshes to reason about parts.

Collision detection

Testing whether a part can be removed without hitting others.

Assembly planning

Deriving the order in which a product can be taken apart or built.

Spline fitting

Fitting smooth curves to extract track curvature from an image.

Teaching by demonstration

A robot learning a task from a person performing it.

Equilibrium-point theory

A model of how the nervous system may command limb posture.

Neuromechanics

How neural control and limb mechanics combine to produce movement.

Legged locomotion

Gait and ground-contact dynamics for a robotic leg.

Radar systems

Radar tracking and trajectory work at Lincoln Laboratory.

GPS navigation

Outdoor waypoint navigation for a rescue robot.

Decision matrices

Scoring concepts against weighted criteria to choose one.

Standards & products

IEC 60601

The safety standard for medical electrical equipment.

Hugo RAS

Medtronic's robotic-assisted surgery system.