Suk Yung (Mike) Lee, 2016, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Suk Yung (Mike) Lee ’16

The goal of the Rapid Forest Triage project, the focus of my summer internship, was to survey a forest autonomously with a quadcopter. Using stereo vision, the quadcopter would traverse the forest while noting the location and diameters of trees to estimate a forest’s biomass. The quadcopter would also take microclimate data measurements with an onboard sensing unit. Using the microclimate and tree data, I created intra-forest ecology maps in MATLAB. Test data sets of forests were also created with manual surveys. We put both sets of data on an interactive website that incorporated a Google Earth embed of surveyed forests, along with corresponding survey data, tree data, and ecology maps. I learned many different technical skills, such as working with the robotics operating framework ROS, the languages of C++, MATLAB, HTML, jQuery, and D3. On a broader level, I really enjoyed using robotics to directly interact with nature. This summer experience verified my love of robotics and fieldwork; I am now considering working specifically on robotics with applications in the natural world. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to work over the summer than JPL, where the talks, the employees, and the current missions redefine what it means to dream big.