CV
Lead iOS developer for entrepreneurial companies with experience in network communications, estimation of device motion and gesture detection, user experience and the iOS frameworks.
Electrical engineer for Jet Propulsion Laboratory with experience in low level robotics systems. Programmer of real-time mobile robots including sensor drivers, position control, state estimation and path planning. Design lead of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) vision algorithms.
iOS Work Experience:
2011-Present, lead iOS developer for American Aeronautics, www.flyincg.com:
Currently writing an application for the iPad to help pilots calculate weight and balance for custom aircraft. This iPad app will replace the previous software interface developed in java by FlyInCG.com.
2008-Present, iSamurai lead developer for Toy Kite Software, www.Toykite.com:
Developed a two player sword-fighting game for the iPhone, iSamurai, which was selected as an Apple staff favorites and featured at the Touch Arcade Launch Party 2009. Released three related apps on the app store, and have one more currently in development.
Electrical Engineer Work Experience:
2004-Present, Jet Propulsion Laboratory:
Fast Rover Traverse (October 2009-present): Led team of 4 engineers in the FPGA design and implementation of reverse rectification of rover imagery and new memory interface to span multiple memory types. Caltech filed a patent application for the new memory interface in May 2011.
Advanced Imaging and Pin Point Landing (June 2009-June 2010): FPGA implementation of a homography upon incoming image streams to allow for Pin Point Landing, and assisted on implementation of a Harris feature detector.
Autonomous Navigation Systems (2007-2010):
FPGA design for vision algorithms. Interfaced cameralink cameras with the FPGA and wrote an SRAM wrapper to store the images. Implemented rectification in an FPGA. Re-wrote stereo correlator to allow for larger images.
Autonomous Aerobots(Dec 2005-present): Avionics Lead. Re-designed the integration board for sensors and servo control of the control surfaces, and re-designed power distribution to CPU and sensors; re-design was from schematic to layout to assembly to cabling and testing. Supported field tests, maintenance, sensor upgrades and new airship integration. Team received NASA Honors Award for outstanding contributions to the NASA Titan mission.
Formation Control Testbed (2005-2010):Re-designed the electronics’ firmware on the robot to interface between the control software and the robot’s hardware. Robot architecture is a mix of Digital Signal Processing (DSP), FPGA, Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD), and Peripheral Interface Controller (PIC) microcontrollers, all of which required substantial modification. Hardware on the robot consists of thrusters, reaction wheels, gyros, a star tracker and air bearings. Led design team to make an Optical Pointing Loop for relative navigation. Designed and tested auto-balancer system. Team received award for achieving key milestone towards Terrestrial Planet Finder mission.
Rover Validation Task (2004-Dec 2005): Testing of the planning and navigation software used on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) to autonomously detect and avoid hazards. The planning software is being evaluated to determine the bounds of success as measured against rock density of the terrain and the slope of the terrain. Assisting in the development and execution of the test plan.
Terminal Descent Sensor (2004-Dec 2005): Wrote a data packet parser/transmitter for the MER Litton Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in Verilog. Incorporated the previous MER design as a submodule to perform bit-wise interpretation of IMU output, parsing the results and sending them over RS232 to the host machine.
JADE (Oct 2004-June 2005): Created data sets of all possible target orientations for feature detection software to train on. Wrote VBScript to interface with Rhino3D (modeling software) to allow future data sets to be run by the untrained with any new target models desired.
Aerobot Autonomy (March 2004-September 2004): Aided in the development of an 11 meter blimp capable of autonomous flight control and state estimation. Worked mainly in modifying electronics hardware configuration based on the results of flight experiments.
2001-2004: Academic Part Time, Jet Propulsion Laboratory:
Robotic Vision 2020 (2002-2004): Maintained robotic test-bed (created under Urban Robot Program) for testing vision algorithms; worked on quantifying user interaction as an effort to prove the effectiveness of autonomous behaviors.
Micro-Robot Explorer (2002-2003): Assisted in the purchasing and assembly of hardware and electronics necessary to build a prototype proof of concept.
http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/tasks/mre/homepage.html
Urban Robot (2001-2003): Edited and wrote C/C++ code for: an interface between the chassis and electronics payload, a SICK laser driver, state localization utilizing a Kalman filter, and a feedback controlled automated turn in place,
http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/tasks/tmr/homepage.html
Design Interests:
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Real-time embedded robotics, control systems and state estimation of mobile robots, with an emphasis on FPGA design.
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iOS application design and development.
Education:
University of California, Los Angeles (Class of 2004)
Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Skills:
Professional: Objective-C, C/C++, Verilog, OrCAD Capture/Layout, Xilinx ISE/EDK toolset,Unix, VxWorks, Windows
Familiarity: Linux, Java, Python, Matlab, VHDL, Altera, MaxPlus2, PSPICE, Ledit, VBScript, Rhino3D.
Publications:
Arin Morfopoulos, Brandon Metz, Carlos Villalpando, Larry Matthies, Navid Serrano, “Implementation of Pin Point Landing Vision Components in an FPGA System”, IEEE Aerospace 2011, Big Sky, Montana
Villalpando.C, Morfopolous.A, Matthies.L, “FPGA Implementation of Stereo Disparity with High Throughput for Mobility Applications”, IEEE Aerospace 2011, Big Sky, Montana
Morfopoulos, A., McHenry, M., and Matthies, L., Reduction of User Interaction by Autonomy, Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems 2004, Gaithersburg, MD.