Throughout grade school, I was involved in the Boy Scouts of America. The Boy Scouts taught me the practicalities of life, survival, service and leadership. It was through them that my young life and philosophies were shaped. I attained the Eagle Scout rank in 2000.
I worked my first job the summer after my freshman year in high school. I had just gotten my driver’s license, so I needed to find work to pay for my car. Through connections made in the Boy Scouts, I was able to find a job working for a construction company that was building a subdivision in a rural area near my hometown. I worked for Klondike all through high school, up until the summer before I started college. Working in construction showed me the meaning of a hard day’s work, and taught me a great deal of common sense.
After high school, I attended the University of Missouri – Rolla, as a student of Computer Engineering. My first year there I became highly involved with the student government in the residence halls, and I founded the student-run UMR Robotics Competition team. In the team’s first two years we participated in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competition, which paired a team of high school students and a team of professionals or college students, in our case, in a non-violent, task-based competition to build a remote-controlled robot with constrained materials in 6 weeks. Later the Team began to participate in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. In the IGVC, participants are tasked to build an autonomous vehicle that can navigate an obstacle course resembling a construction zone. In the halls, I became the President of the Quadrangle Hall Association in 2001, a position that taught me much about leadership and organization.
The summer after my Freshman year at UMR was able to work as an summer intern for Distribution Control Systems, Inc. DCSI designed and manufactured a power line communication system that power companies could use to do load balancing, power factor correction, and over-the-wire meter reading. I worked there for two summers, updating one of their products with surface mount parts.
During the school year, I worked odd jobs for the University. I worked as a computer lab-monitor and later for the University maintenance department. During my third year at UMR I became a Resident Assistant at the Thomas Jefferson residence hall. This experience taught me a great deal about how to work with different kinds of people.
The summer after my third year at UMR I began working for Imagination Engines Inc, based out of St. Louis. IEI is an artificial intelligence company developing applications of neural network technology. I worked there on a project to implement IEI’s proprietary neural network technology in hardware, as well as a 6-legged robotics project.
My senior project at UMR was a security robot for the UMR experimental nuclear reactor. The robot was designed move along the underside of a large I-beam that ran the length of the reactor building. In this way a single robot, equipped with a camera and an infrared detector, could autonomously patrol the entire reactor bay. The I-beam was also equipped with a charging dock so that the robot could operate indefinitely.
I graduated from UMR with a B.S. of Computer Engineering in 2005, after which I stayed at UMR to pursue a Master’s Degree in computer engineering. I began working for Dr. Donald C. Wunsch at the Applied Computational Intelligence Laboratory. I am currently working on the Learning Applied to Ground Robotics project, to develop a ground vehicle that can not only navigate unknown terrain, but be able to learn from experience with the world. During the summer of 2006 I worked at the Boeing Phantom Works in Seattle, WA, developing algorithms for adaptive control of a swarm of flying robots under varying environmental conditions and failures.