Hi, I'm Patrick.
I work on autonomous platforms and robotic systems.

Context

RoboSub is an international competition where autonomous underwater vehicles complete submerged missions: navigating courses, identifying objects, and manipulating targets without remote control. Each run is fully autonomous, robots must make every decision on their own from sensor inputs, with no human guidance during the mission.

Approach

Led system design for the club's newest competition robot with plug-and-play PCB electrical architecture and modular sensor configuration in software. Built a robot-agnostic ROS 2 stack for sensor communication and developed sonar-based computer vision for underwater object detection.

Context

Profile insights are small pieces of information on a user's profile, such as mutual friend count, that help players learn about each other. Roblox theorized that showing the game two users play together most often could help new users find higher-quality friends; my project was to integrate this new insight into the existing profile insights system.

Approach

Worked with PMs to define the product, then built a solution combining batch offline processing with fast real-time updates. Implemented backend services, data pipelines, and cross-platform UI surfacing recent viewer interaction and the most frequently played game between the viewer and the profile being viewed.

Context

Tendon-driven surgical continuum robots need real-time tension feedback for closed-loop control, but commercial load cells cost thousands of dollars and have long lead times that slow prototyping.

Approach

Designed and calibrated a compact tendon tension measurement unit using standard, easily obtainable components and 3D-printed housing. Optimized the design for low cost, short fabrication lead time, and mass-manufacturability at small scale.

Context

Minimally invasive endonasal surgery requires continuum robots that can navigate delicate anatomical paths while providing precise, tendon-driven actuation and force feedback.

Approach

Co-designed multi-material actuation systems for a tendon-actuated concentric tube endonasal robot, focusing on tendon routing and actuator compactness, optimized for size within identified constraints.

Context

A computer architecture project to design a working processor from scratch and run real interactive software on FPGA hardware built around a custom CPU.

Approach

Designed a 5-stage pipelined processor with custom ALU, multiplication and division support, VGA display output, accelerometer input, and 7-segment display scoring. Wrote game logic, custom CPU instructions, background music, and scoring programs in assembly.

Context

Compiler construction requires translating a high-level language through multiple formal stages, from syntax and types to executable machine code, while maintaining correctness at each stage. The project followed Andrew Appel's Tiger language and pipeline as presented in Modern Compiler Implementation in ML.

Approach

Built a Tiger language compiler in functional programming with SML/NJ, implementing parsing, typechecking, intermediate representation generation, instruction selection, liveness analysis, register allocation, and optimization techniques.

Context

Legal requirements mandate a public, unauthenticated website showing every ad served on the Roblox platform within the past year. The system must be efficient and extensible as new ad formats are added.

Approach

Designing the full-stack architecture: data pipelines ingesting ads, Kafka queues for reliable event processing, Elasticsearch indices for search and retrieval, and backend services to serve the dataset. Building a public Next.js frontend for browsing and filtering ads.