Mechanical Engineer II
Fresh Consulting supports the product development projects of some of the biggest players in the tech industry. With a very diverse portfolio of both digital and hardware clients in the greater Seattle area and broader, the work is highly varied, fast paced, and rewarding.
Below are a few examples of projects I have contributed to.
Autonomous Club Car
United Rentals asked Fresh Consulting to automate a Club Car vehicle as a potential people and materials mover for construction sites. We used SICK and Velodyne LiDAR, RTK GPS, and a CompactRIO control system running LabVIEW FPGA and LabVIEW Real-Time code with control logic to drive the vehicle.
Project MOAB
Our team built Project Moab to complete the initial objective of balancing a ball via machine learning. Engineers can teach Moab to catch balls thrown toward it or even after they bounce on a table. Moab, a ball-balancing robot, is operated using motion control, visualized in simulation on Microsoft Project Bonsai, coordinated using trained Project Bonsai brains, and then deployed to the physical bot.
Air Hockey Delta Bot
Microsoft is driving innovation in which AI can be used to teach machines to learn from and respond to the physical world. Fresh Consulting was requested to create an interactive public demonstration for a trade show using an existing delta type robot. The result was this air-hockey goal defending robot that increased visitors to the Microsoft AI exposition area.
Product Life Testers
Fresh designs testers for early product research as well as ongoing factory-quality programs. Life testing is critical to building high-quality products that will be reliable in the real world. Fresh has built many custom life test systems supporting up to 64 products per tester.
Worldwide Ventilator
As a response to the global respirator shortage as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, Fresh Consulting revisited a concept from the past to progress the availability of low cost ventilators. The bistable fluidic amplifier is a passive device requiring no power that assists in both inhalation and exhalation. We prototyped several devices and put them in the hands of specialists for further evaluation.