Xuan-Truc Nguyen

- Led the mechanical design of an enterprise quadcopter from concept through manufacturing - Engineers drone components for 3D printing, CNC machining, and injection molding - Selects components and materials for mechanical parts including arms, motors, propellers, fuselage - Integrates complex electronics (NVIDIA Jetson, GPS, battery, sensors, cooling) into mechanical systems - Rapid-prototypes and bench-tests drone subassemblies to validate performance and reliability before installation - Conducts thorough field testing to prepare drones for delivery to customers; analyzes flight logs to optimize drone performance through controller tuning, sensor filtering, and windspeed estimation - Coordinates with suppliers, machine shops, and contractors to source reliable high-quality custom parts - Developed a patented lightweight (0.5-kg) delivery system to safely lower payloads from a 40-m-high drone, minimizing size and weight while maintaining speed and reliability

- Created lightest known (633-mg) autonomous controllable artificial insect by engineering custom PCB and chassis from concept to completion including design, manufacturing, testing, and troubleshooting - Integrated two shape-memory alloy (SMA) crawling modules to develop steering mechanism, created fastest (relative to body length) real-time controllable sub-gram crawling robot (60-mg) from raw materials - Made lightest (30-mg) SMA crawler ever by implementing novel actuator and frictionally anisotropic legs - Achieved microrobotic autonomy by engineering small (1-cm), light (6-mg), high-frequency SMA actuator - Improved flier maneuverability by utilizing wing-pitching mechanism to increase thrust-to-weight ratio by 40% - Secured laboratory funding by preparing successful research proposals for grants from NSF and DARPA - Communicated research findings to academic audiences through written manuscripts and oral presentations - Led discussions, office hours for 3 undergrad/grad courses in linear algebra, manufacturing, and dynamics

- Modeled articular bone surfaces as non-uniform rational basis splines to predict morphology of extinct species - Investigated effects of bone surfaces on joint function using MATLAB to process CT scans

- Interviewed clients, engineered needle and image guidance system for bone marrow aspiration and biopsy - Developed surgical system for end user using magnets and nitinol to facilitate endovascular aneurysm repair

- Interviewed, trained, and managed 30 technicians; delegated tickets; communicated regular updates to team - Repaired computer hardware and software; maintained 20 computer and printer clusters across campus

- Characterized interlocking particle deformation response to stress and shear in Instron machine experiments - Analyzed effects of particle interlocking on granular packing strength for soil engineering applications