Internships

Fida Newaj ’18

Lightening Energy is a small contractor company for the U.S. Army. They specialize in making rapid charging batteries that charge in minutes instead of hours. I worked on prototyping an application of this battery. My partner and I built a robot that can navigate a rectangular grid by itself. All the user has to do is give the coordinates of where he/she wants the robot to be via bluetooth, and the robot will be able to navigate itself to the coordinates. The robot was also able to return to the charging station and charge its battery without any human instruction. This technology can be used as an autonomous warehouse forklift. Currently it takes about half an hour and several operators to replace a forklift battery and several hours for the battery to charge. Through this internship, I learned a lot about microprocessors, C programming, control theory, and batteries. My summer experience has made me interested in prototyping systems and working with more hardware in the future.