Hello! I’m Calum, a Scottish engineer, currently working as a PhD researcher in robot learning and control at the University of Edinburgh & Heriot-Watt University.
My research is about enabling robots to be better at decisision making under uncertainty.
I am also managing director of Lerta, a company I co-founded to develop accessible systems for environmental challenges, including drone-based wildfire detection.
Research
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Amortising Trajectory Optimisation for Residual MPC via Implicit Contact Differentiation
Details
Performing robot trajectory optimisation for contact-rich tasks often requires us to calculate gradients through a simulator’s contact solver. We implement a memory efficient way to recover these gradients with the Implicit Function Theorem. We then show how this memory saving supports us to do parallel trajectory optimisation with larger batches across several robot tasks in simulation. Finally, we distill a policy from successful trajectories and show how this can reduce the planning horizon required by a residual iLQR controller.
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Flight Performance of a Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Digital Displacement Hydrostatic Transmission
Details
In this work we present the design of Flowcopter’s FC-100, a hybrid-hydraulic multirotor UAV driven by a Digital Displacement® hydrostatic transmission. We present the background concept and modelling of the propulsion system and a range of validation experiments, from a single rotor to the full-scale demonstrator in flight. Some of our findings include a larger ground effect than a helicopter with equivalent rotor disk area; negligible loss of lift efficiency when hovering in winds up to 11.2 m/s; and improved lift efficiency at lower forward speeds.
Writing
Coming soon.
This October, I’ve been enjoying:
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Book
The Winter of Our DiscontentJohn Steinbeck
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Movie / TV
The PittHBO Max
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Music
PaddywhackeryThe Mary Wallopers
