My name is Tyler Veness. I'm a graduate from University of California,
Santa Cruz with a bachelor's degree in Robotics Engineering. My hobbies
include software engineering, controls engineering, teaching those topics
to high school students in the FIRST Robotics Competition.
Projects
Most of my free time is devoted to writing software for robotic
applications. This includes contributing to WPILib and writing a book on
modern control theory.
A portfolio of my projects is available on GitHub.
Sleipnir
- A linearity-exploiting sparse nonlinear constrained optimization
problem solver that uses the interior-point method
- Written by me and an FRC student in C++20
- Uses custom symbolic autodiff with linearity detection to cache
results
- Uses Eigen for
sparse linear algebra
- Beats CasADi + ipopt by an
order of magnitude on quadratic problems (quick convergence on nonlinear
problems is still a work in progress)
Controls Engineering in FRC
- A practical guide to controls engineering for high school
students
- Covers:
- Fundamentals of control theory
- Modern control theory (state-space, LQR)
- Kalman filters
- System modeling (Newtonian and Lagrangian mechanics)
- Motion planning (1 DOF profiles, trajectory optimization)
- The latest PDF is available here
WPILib
- A C++ and Java library used by about 3000 high school FIRST Robotics
Competition teams
- Helped modernize C++/Java code base and APIs (JDK 11, C++20)
- Maintained and contributed heavily to wpimath
subproject and facilitated community contributions
- Maintained style guide for WPILib projects and wrote wpiformat
Python module to automate conformance
- Used Google's cpplint.py, clang-format, and custom checks and
transformations