At Collins Aerospace, I mostly worked on a team that developed the
Fusion Flight Management System
for military customers. This went into aircraft such as the
Embraer KC-390
and Airbus C-295. On this team,
I contributed to all parts of the engineering “V”, including requirements and
traceability, writing unit and integration tests, and actual flight software written in
Ada. All of this fell under DO-178B
certification requirements.
Me taking a tour of the company jet with ProLine Fusion avionics installed
Towards the end of my co-op, I worked directly under a principal engineer on
the KC-46 Remote Vision System.
An example of two operators controlling the air-to-air refueling boom
This system allows operators to control the air-to-air refueling boom of the KC-46
while sitting comfortably at the front of the aircraft with more situational awareness.
The operators wear 3D glasses with the primary display being 3D to get depth perception.
I was able to build a small mockup of this system in our lab with 2 Logitech joysticks,
a desktop 5-axis robot, and some Python code. This proved
invaluable for small-scale tests without needing to use the facilities at the
Air Force Research Lab.
Finally, at the end of my co-op, I co-invented a system with the aforementioned
principal engineer to facilitate the calibration of two stereoscopic cameras
by using a single laser projected on a surface. This was awarded as patent
US11360375B1. I wrote the original
description of the invention and prepared all the diagrams when it was originally
submitted internally for review.
