Video tutorials
A video series on programming and electrical setup for FTC, to get beginner teams’ robots moving. I made it to make easy the things I found hard when I started.
Mechatronics Engineering · University of Waterloo
Armaan Sengupta
I work across embedded firmware, controls and mechanical design. Most recently I wrote implant firmware at Neuralink and vehicle lighting firmware at Tesla. Below is a selection of projects, starting with a ball-balancing Stewart platform.
More projects
Stewart Platform
Led the mechanical, electrical, software and firmware design of a ball balancer that finds a 538 g steel ball from the moment it produces on a force-torque…
Rocket Airbrakes
Designed the cam mechanism that drives three panels from one servo, and co-wrote the firmware that steers Borealis to its target apogee.
Automated Measurement System
Led the firmware for a station that measures parts to 0.3 mm, including a custom 2-wire protocol to the VEX brain.
Neuralink
Blindsight is Neuralink's visual prosthesis, which aims to give people who are blind a form of sight by stimulating the brain through an implant. I worked…
Tesla
On the Body Controls firmware team I worked on exterior lighting: the firmware that drives a vehicle's lights and detects when one has failed, across the…
Ixana
Ixana's Wi-R silicon uses the wearer's body as the data link between devices, using less power than Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. My project was to stream video over…
Magna
Parts can crack as a hydraulic press stamps them. I built a real-time monitor that catches it in the die, using strain gauges embedded near the die, so…
FYELABS
Industrial garbage trucks reverse in harsh, dirty conditions and need to reliably avoid people and objects. I worked on an autonomous back-up safety system…
The Trashminator
Designed and built an autonomous surface robot that collects floating trash, meant to work in swarms.
Radial Engine
Modelled twenty-plus parts from orthographic drawings and assembled them into a working six-cylinder linkage.
Clamping Hub
Designed and FEA-tested an ultra-low-profile clamping shaft hub, now sold commercially by Studica.
Contact Localization
Built a MuJoCo–ROS 2 bridge for the Franka Panda, with force injection to benchmark contact localization.
Beam Balancer
Took a 1-D ball balancer from linkage design to working firmware in two weeks.
Segway Dynamics
Derived the equations of motion for a human transporter by hand and checked them in Simulink against SimulationX.
Two-Axis Gantry
Wrote the STM32 firmware: interrupt-driven endstops, homing, UART positioning and an ADC-characterized pot.
LiDAR Point Clouds
Wrote filtering, voxel downsampling and a fast furthest-pair search for millions of points.
FTC 16397 Robots
All software, solo. Control Award at the Asia Pacific Open Championship.
Robot in 3 Days
Organized the event and built a ring-launching robot in 48 hours with five people.
Off-Road Tank Tread
Designed a tracked drive concept for rough terrain, shown here as a CAD render.
The Gooseminator
Sweeps an area and sorts bird eggs by whether they are an invasive or protected species.
3-DOF Robotic Arm
Built in under 8 hours from a Tetrix kit to pick up oddly shaped bones and sort them.
Skills
Hover one to see where it was used.
Volunteering · Mentoring · Teaching
Robotics, beyond my own builds.
Mentoring
I personally mentor other FTC teams, most closely 18846 and 17003, with everything from mechanical design to programming reliability.
Outreach
Robotics demos for companies and schools beyond the robotics community, including Sheridan College, the City of Brampton, BGC Peel, OpenText and middle schools.
Summer camp
With FIRST Canada we gave 38 robotics kits to schools without a robotics club, then taught them over two summers, from building to programming robots.
FTC Sim
I beta tested and then publicly demoed FTC Sim, a virtual robotics simulator, and was then hired by FIRST Canada to teach classes on it for two years.
FRC lessons
As captain of my high school’s FRC team, I created and organized the lessons for newcomers, and taught the mechanical design lessons.
