Waste Heat Recovery System

Another cool project that I am working is related to Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) systems. We intend to use the WHR system for automotive applications to recover the engine exhaust gas heat and convert it to useful electrical energy. At the moment, as many of you know, the exhaust heat energy is not used in any sense, even though it represents 30 to 40% from the fuel energy. If we are able to recover part of this lost energy, future combustion engines can be much more efficient than now. However, the big challenge to make this a success is to make it work in highly dynamic conditions while maximizing its efficiency. And these are the main aspects I am focusing in this project.

Below, you can see a cool video filmed partly with the heat camera. Enjoy the video and don’t forget to subscribe for more updates on the project. See you next time!

 

Autonomous navigation with Jackal robot

In this project, me and my colleagues from work want to program our Jackal robot (a very nice platform from Clearpath Robotics) to do autonomous tasks. The idea is that the robot can serve as companion, communicate with people and execute small tasks like bringing a coffee, carry some things, etc.

Recently, we just succeeded  in making the robot navigate autonomously including obstacle avoidance. Check out the video below to see what came out.

Next, we are going to implement autonomous exploration to completely map our office, equip the robot with more sensors and work on human interaction with the robot. Stay tuned for more!

My first IoT robot

Recently, I just built my first robot from scratch and I am very happy with the result.

The robot is powered by servo motors and has the following features:

• 5DOF robot, actually 4 if we exclude the gripper

• the brain is an Arduino Yun with IoT capabilities

• the control interface is built in Blynk app

• forward kinematic are implemented in Matlab using the Robotics Toolbox

• a new library that I wrote which realizes a smooth motion

If you are interested on how to build it, please check out my description on the Arduino project hub.