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.

Controls Engineering in FRC

• A practical guide to state-space control intended for high school students
• Covers fundamentals of state-space control, LQR, and Kalman filter design
• 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 8, C++11/14/17)
• Managed community contributions of WPILib controls features
• Geometry (Translation2d, Rotation2d, Pose2d)
• 2D trajectory generation and constraints
• Led development of state-space controls library
• LQR and model-based feedforwards
• Kalman filters (linear, extended, unscented) and pose estimators
• State-space model discretization
• Numerical integration (RK4, RKF45, RKDP)
• Numerical Jacobian
• Made APIs use higher order functions instead of inheritance for improved composability
• Wrote TrapezoidProfile, ProfiledPIDController, and LinearFilter

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

Banana Piano

• Used analog input pins and pull-up resistors for using any object as keys for a piano; human was ground
• State of pins was sent to client application via serial over USB
• Used Arduino instead of Makey Makey (the inspiration), then ported to BeagleBone with Python

Hackintosh-cxx

• Program for cracking lower alphanumeric passwords hashed with MD5 using computers in parallel
• Wrote benchmark for testing performance improvements; used profiler
• Learned importance of data ordering in cache lines for performance-critical applications

3dCapClient

• Showed location of the user's hand in three dimensions using three large orthogonal capacitor plates
• Learned serial port over USB communication with Arduino and 3D OpenGL rendering