Sensing | Henry Kou

ARPA-E Pipe Inspection

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I worked on this as a confined-space robotics problem: how do you make an inspection robot useful when the environment is narrow, dark, repetitive, and hard to instrument? Pipe inspection is not just a mobility problem. The robot also has to keep enough sensing coverage and map consistency for an operator to understand where defects or misalignments are located.

My work connected crawler hardware, embedded sensing, and mapping interfaces. The mapping GUI below shows the kind of alignment problem that comes up when local sensor observations have to be stitched into a coherent pipe-scale view. In a pipe, small pose errors are easy to hide visually but can become large localization errors along the run, so the inspection interface needs to expose uncertainty and misalignment clearly rather than only showing a polished map.

Sources I leaned on: Thrun, Burgard, and Fox’s Probabilistic Robotics for the localization and mapping mindset; Grisetti, Kummerle, Stachniss, and Burgard’s graph-based SLAM tutorial for pose-graph thinking; and pipe/cave robot literature from CMU’s confined-space robotics work for practical constraints on mobility, sensing, and operator feedback.

Keywords: ARPA-E, pipe inspection, confined-space robotics, crawler robot, mapping, sensing, embedded systems, inspection robotics.

Boeing Material Deposition

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am working on a process-control idea for ultra-large-format additive manufacturing, where the robot is big enough that structural vibration becomes part of the manufacturing process. If a long-reach system is depositing material for aircraft, bridge, or infrastructure repair, the tool may be commanded to move smoothly while the actual nozzle is still oscillating.

The key shift is to stop treating motion control as the only place to fix the error. A low-stiffness plant may not have enough bandwidth or model certainty to fully cancel the vibration, but the deposition process can still react to the measured tool motion. My approach changes the deposition timing and rate based on real-time trajectory deviation, so material lands more evenly even when the tool path is imperfect.

I validate the idea on a custom testbench that emulates the deposition dynamics. The sensor measures high-bandwidth tool motion, the controller estimates deviation from the desired path, and the process layer schedules material output around the residual vibration. The practical lesson is that process quality can sometimes be improved by controlling when material is added, not only by trying to make the structure perfectly still.

Sources I leaned on: Altintas’ work on manufacturing automation and process control; input-shaping literature from Singer and Seering for vibration-aware motion; and additive-manufacturing control papers on bead geometry, melt-pool monitoring, and closed-loop deposition rate control.

Status: In progress.

Keywords: ultra large format additive manufacturing, ULF-AM, process control, deposition scheduling, vibration compensation, high-bandwidth sensing, trajectory deviation estimation, material deposition, manufacturing robotics.

Medusa Space Arms

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I worked on Medusa as a space-robotics arm testbed, where the physical setup makes coordination visible. The carriage-mounted arm lets us study manipulation and sensing on a system that is not just a fixed industrial arm bolted to the floor; base motion and arm motion both matter.

The project connects mechanical system design, embedded sensing, and control implementation. The useful technical question is how much coordination you can get from a real platform when sensing, actuation limits, and geometry are all present at once. Watch the .

Sources I leaned on: Yoshida’s space robot dynamics work for free-floating manipulation context; Dubowsky and Papadopoulos on planning and control for space manipulators; and standard resolved-rate / operational-space control references for connecting arm motion to task-space behavior.

Keywords: space robotics, robotic arms, manipulation, carriage-mounted testbed, controls, sensing, embedded systems.