I developed a chat bot in Python that utilizes the Opsdroid chat bot framework to receive questions from the show’s chat room to be answered on-air. Many viewers use this bot each week and has enabled us to take questions live from people who do not want to call in.

I researched, deployed, and themed an open-source solution to stream the show to our audience. The main motive for this was a modern UI and anonymous chat that we could bridge to Matrix. I achieved these things by deploying a customized version of Owncast and by writing a bot to bridge the Owncast chat to Matrix and vice versa.

I was hired as an intern to advise on the feasibility of using the Vex Robotics platform in one of NASA’s Artemis Student Challenges — the Lunar Lava Tube Exploration Challenge hosted by Washington Space Grant Consortium.

I designed, using CAD, a rover capable of being lowered through a skylight onto rough terrain to navigate over several types of obstacles. The robot did this using a method similar to how Mars rovers work by humans seeing through a camera on the front of the rover to give guidance on where the rover should go. The robot used sensors to navigate the terrain semi autonomously.