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
• Geometry (Translation2d, Rotation2d, Pose2d, Translation3d, Rotation3d, Pose3d)
• 2D trajectory generation and constraints
• DARE solver
• LQR and model-based feedforwards
• Kalman filters (linear, extended, unscented) and pose estimators
• Numerical integration (RK4, RKDP)

wpiformat

• 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