📂 RESEARCH & PROJECTS.EXE

Contributed to a U.S. Air Force–funded project on autonomous UAV navigation in GNSS-denied environments, supporting Personnel Recovery (PR) and Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) missions. Focused on multi-UAV coordination and robust, high-accuracy localization in degraded environments. Integrated the AmiShare communication system for real-time encrypted peer-to-peer UAV communication

Contributed to a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)–funded project on cooperative UGV–UAV exploration in subterranean environments. Integrated UAV localization within a UGV reference frame to enable precise mapping and navigation in GPS-denied tunnels and caves. Focused on FGO-based state estimation to deliver accurate UAV trajectories and support resilient multi-robot autonomy for underground search and rescue missions.

Masters thesis project developing a LiDAR-based UAV position estimation system using the PointPillars deep learning architecture for real-time 3D object detection. Created a custom dataset of 7,000+ annotated LiDAR scans and achieved a 30% improvement in localization accuracy over traditional point cloud clustering methods.

Participated in NASA's Space Robotics Challenge Phase 2, a ROS/Gazebo simulated autonomous lunar rover competition, as part of WVU's Team Mountaineers. Supported the perception team with image acquisition, processing pipelines, and sensor fusion for autonomous lunar surface operations. The team placed 6th in the final round.