About
Welcome to my personal portfolio! This website is made by hand using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap.
From a time before AI coding tools...
Welcome to my web resume! My name is Nikhil and I'm a research based Master's student at Prof. Tim Barfoot's lab at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. My research interests are in enabling long-duration autonomy in unstructured environments. I completed my undergrad in Engineering Science at UofT, during which time I gained experience working in the Canadian space industry. I have contributed to both real and anaologue space missions, primarily to the BEACON mission which will explore the lunar south pole with a small CubeRover in 2026. Robotics and aerospace have been long-term passions of mine, stemming from a childhood love of space exploration, and I'd love to continue gaining experience in those domains.
This site is intended to serve as a supplement to my resume. It contains information that I didn't have enough space to fit in my resume, but that I still feel is worth talking about somwehere. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn, and take a look at my GitHub for examples of the public code I've written in the past!
Education
University of Toronto (Institue for Aerospace Studies)
2026 - Present
MASc in Aerospace Science and Engineering
Research based degree at the Autonomous Space Robotics Lab
Supervised by Prof. Tim Barfoot
Recipent of the Vector Scholarship in AI
University of Toronto
2021 - 2026
BASc in Engineering Science - Aerospace Engineering
Minor in Robotics Engineering
Certificate in Artificial Intelligence
cGPA: 3.98 / 4.00
Recipent of the Anthony A. Haasz Scholarship
Recipient of the Trenwith & Galipeau Aerospace Science Award
Recipient of the Kenneth M. Molson Award For Excellence In Aircraft Design
Work Experience
Mission Control Space Robotics/Software Engineering Co-op Student
Sept 2024 - Aug 2025
- Co-op student at Mission Control, an Ottawa based space robotics/autonomy company, for a 1 year work term - developed software on the Missions team
- Primarily focused on writing ground software for the BEACON lunar rover in collaboration with Astrobotic (Griffin-1 payload)
- Contributed to ground software architecture design, writing software, testing/validation via operations rehearsals for BEACON
- Designed, implemented, and debugged software tools and algorithms to assist BEACON mission operators
- Contributed to documentation, proposal writing, and supported outreach activities such as the CSA/MDA Rover Driving Academy
- Professional moon sweeper
Autonomous Space Robotics Laboratory (UTIAS) Summer Research Student
May 2023 - Aug 2023
- Interned at ASRL, Prof. Barfoot's lab at the UofT Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS)
- Worked on the lab's Visual Teach and Repeat (VTR) software, which enables robots to learn paths and retrace them using vision/lidar
- Implemented numerous ease-of-use updates to the VTR UI, enabling faster field testing - this involved making both frontend and backend changes to VTR
- VTR UI improvements involved writing ROS2 code in Python and C++ in the backend, and React JS code in the frontend
- Worked with grad students to set up the lab's new Clearpath Warthog robot for field trials - as a part of this, wrote code to debug controller tracking issues and presented findings
- Assisted with data collection for an ICRA paper on a novel method for unsupervised training of point cloud change detection networks - this involved over 8 km of field trials with the lab's Warthog robot
VEX Robotics Head Mentor at Zebra Robotics
July 2021 - Present
- Head mentor/previous member of a ~10 member high school robotics team which designs a robot every year using VEX COTS parts to compete in a sports-like game with other robots
- Responsibilities include teaching technical skills (eg. Solidworks, C++, part machining), guiding the team's design process, and providing technical expertise when problems are encountered
- Have taught engineering design concepts/tools such as requirement models and Pugh charts - arguably, this has somewhat led to the team's success in winning Design awards at competition
ESROP Global (KMUTT) Summer Research Student
May 2022 - Aug 2022
- Participated in an international summer research exchange program for EngSci students in cooperation with KMUTT (university in Bangkok, Thailand)
- Proposed and led a project to determine the viability of Graph Convolutional Networks in predicting the locations of splice sites in pre-mRNA sequences using computationally folded secondary structure data
- Developed a prototype GCN for RNA splice site prediction (called GRASS) using Tensorflow and Spektral, culminating in a poster presentation at UnERD (Undergraduate Engineering Research Day at UofT)
Design Team Experience
UofT Aerospace Team (UTAT) - Space Systems (CubeSat) Member - Firmware
May 2023 - Present
- Member of the firmware subteam, which writes flight code for the team's 3U CubeSat
- Worked on a CAN handler for communication between separate onboard microcontrollers
- Drafting a framework for software based watchdogs to safeguard against program crashes in orbit
UofT Aerospace Team (UTAT) - Rocketry Member - Liquid Propulsion
Aug 2022 - Dec 2023
- On the liquid propulsion subteam, designed a fuel injector for the team's pintle engine - this design underwent cold flow testing and performed better than the existing pintle design
- Conducted an O-Ring selection study to seal components of the injector from each other and the engine nozzle
- Assembled a launch ready Tripoli L1 class rocket for individual certification, and travlelled to upstate New York for launch
FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 4308 - Team Co-Captain & Design Lead
Sept 2017 - June 2021
- Co-Captain and Design Lead on a 90+ member high school design team which designed, built, and programmed an industrial sized robot every year to compete in a sports-like game against other teams
- Was deeply involved in the design of multiple subsystems using Solidworks and high school physics concepts
- As Design Lead, ran CAD lessons, coordinated design/CAD efforts across a design subteam, and coordinated with other subteam leads to build the robot
- As one of two Team Co-Captains, delegated and made decisions alongside a nominated 12 member executive team, and coordinated with staff sponsors and external manufacturing/purchasing partners (ie. purchasing stock material, outsourcing machining of parts, etc.)
VEX Robotics Competition (VRC) Team 3505E - Team Captain
Sept 2017 - June 2021
- Team Captain of a ~10 member high school design team which designed, built, and programmed a 18 in3 robot to compete in a sports-like game against other teams
- Robots were designed in Solidworks, built using COTS parts from VEX, and programmed in C++ - I was deeply involved in all of these tasks
- During Covid, derived a custom wheel based odometry algorithm to track the robot's position on the field while autonomous
- Continue to mentor this team - in 2021, led the team to the VEX World Finals in Dallas, Texas for the first time in the team's history
Personal Projects
Stirling Engine
Jan 2021
- During COVID, attempted to design a functional Stirling Engine as a physics project
- Determined physical constraints, and developed a mathematical model to aid in choosing physical parameters
- Used Solidworks to CAD the engine, then ordered parts and constructed it
- Unfortunately, the engine ran into frictional issues that could not be easily overcome without additional spending on parts
- All of this was done for a physics class, and I documented every step, available here
Holonomic Pure Pursuit Simulator
Jan 2021
- Motivation
- It had been a longtime personal goal of mine to implement Pure Pursuit type path following algorithms for autonomous control of VRC robots (see VRC)
- During Covid lockdowns, I was unable to test these algorithms on a physical VEX robot
- Instead, I decided to simulate them virtually so that I could implement them on a physical robot later (unfortunately I graduated before lockdowns were lifted)
- Developed a Python based simulator using a Tkinter frontend to simulate the first order dynamics of a holonomic drivetrain (using high school physics concepts)
- Implemented a path planner and Pure Pursuit controller on this virtual drivetrain, assuming perfect odometry input
- Given an initial and target robot pose, the algorithm first interpolates between them using a Hermite spline (a cubic), then samples a number of discrete waypoints along the spline
- At each step, the drivetrain follows a simple proportional control loop targeting one of these waypoints - once it gets close enough, it switches the target to the next waypoint along the spline
- This process repeats, while angular error is handled by a separate proportional control loop (can be decoupled since the system is holonomic)
VEX COTS Spacing Calculator
May 2020
- Motivation
- When assembling mechanisms for VRC (see VRC), improper spacing in the assembly of VEX COTS parts can lead to flimsiness or a drop in performance (usually due to friction)
- This is normally aleviated by using CAD software (ie. Solidworks) to plan out the relative spacing of each part, but that is unwieldy when rapidly prototyping to test design ideas
- This leads to prototypes being flimsy/inefficient, which provides a skewed understanding of design ideas
- Developed a Tkinter based application in Python to aid in rapidly calculating the optimal spacing between VEX COTS parts
- This part spacing tool allows users to virtually test out combinations of COTS spacing elements between standard VEX parts - this is much faster than full blown CAD, and requires no physical guesswork
HSS Course Filter
July 2022
- Motivation
- EngSci students are required to take a certain number of Humanities & Social Science (HSS) courses throughout our degree - most students take one in their 4th semester
- These courses are usually offered by a different faculty, so scheduling with EngSci 2nd year timetables was a challenge at the time - there were 700+ valid HSS courses, but most were not running in 4th semester or were incompatible with our schedules
- There was no existing tool provided by the university to filter HSS courses by compatibility with personal timetables - so I made my own
- Created a web-scraping tool using Selenium (in Python) to iterate through a list of valid HSS courses and query UofT's course info website for scheduling info on each one
- Results were compiled into a JSON containing only courses that were running in 4th semester
- Wrote another Python program to take in an individual's timetable as a CSV, and filter it against the JSON to provide a list of courses with no scheduling conflicts
- For my schedule, this process narrowed down my list of possible courses from 742 to 29
- Distributed the JSON and filtering program to my peers
- Unfortunately, within a few days UofT made their course info website inaccessible to Selenium bots, possibly as a result of my script's abuse - as a result this script is no longer functional
Schoolwork Management Spreadsheet
Dec 2021
- Created a Google Sheets + Query Language spreadsheet to manage my schoolwork throughout the term - for the past couple of years, I have used this in place of a personal calendar and to-do list
- At the start of each term, I manually populate the spreadsheet with assignment due dates and mark breakdowns
- The sheet uses the Google Visualization API Query Language to generate a continuously updating to-do list of items due in the coming days
- This to-do list is organized so that the earliest due tasks appear first, with their colour indicating their importance (mark-distribution wise)
- As tasks are completed, they can be marked off of the sheet, which removes them from the to-do list
- When marks are released for assignments, they can be added to the sheet to compute per-course marks to-date and projected marks
- Distributed this sheet to my peers, some of whom still use it on a daily basis
- A copy of this sheet is available here
IoT Lights
June 2023
- For a birthday gift, created sets of RGB lights that pull from the Internet to remain synced to the same colour
- Used Raspberry Pi Picos to periodically pull data from a private Discord server as a POST request, then set pinouts to make lights the correct colour
- User control is via Discord - any messages sent in the private Discord server are taken as commands by the Picos
- Each Pico and light pair was soldered together to form a single, standalone IoT device
Bridge Calculator
Nov 2021
- Developed a Python program to (approximately) calculate the loads present on a hybrid truss/beam bridge
- This was for a bridge design project in my first year Civil Engineering course, but this program went above and beyond by being able to calculate the loads on any arbitrary system of truss members
- My team used this program to design an optimal bridge, then constructed it out of matboard and tested to failure
Past Achievements
World Robotics Olympiad (ROBOTC)
- 2018 — 3rd Place at Nationals, qualified to International finals in Chiang Mai, Thailand
- 2019 — 2nd Place at Nationals
- 2018 — Provincial Finalists
- 2019 — Regional Semifinalists
- 2020 — Regional Quarterfinalists
- 2020 — Regional Finalists
- 2021 — Provincial Design Award Winners, qualified to International finals in Dallas, Texas
- 2019 — Top 2% (Junior Category)
- 2020 — Top 25% (Senior Category)
- 2020 — Top 10 Multiple Choice, qualified to International finals in Nashville, Tennessee