Hi, I'm Ryan Verbrugge. I'm a Robotics Engineer where I focus on perception and mapping systems for autonomous vehicles. I've worked in various research labs over the past few years, starting off in Dr. Tan Chen's Robotic Locomotion and Applied Control (RoLAC), then moving to my most recent location in Dr. Jeremy Bos's Robust Autonomous Systems Lab (RASL). I still have some work with that lab as of the time I'm writing this with the Bat Project, but since graduation I've stepped away from the other projects.
Early Beginnings
Although I won't go all the way back to when I was born, I thought I'd begin with at least my start in high school since that's probably the beginning of my engineering days (kind of). In the interest of keeping this section short I won't get too much into the details.
As I was originally from the Detroit area, I went to the Utica Academy for International Studies, which was an IB full diploma school. Since the main idea behind IB is creating well-rounded students, I had a wide range of classes including four years of Spanish, two years of psychology, and three years of physics. I also wrote my Extended Essay on the psychology behind stress and how peer-to-peer relationships affect it. I graduated in the spring of 2021 with my full IB Diploma and then turned towards the great north of Michigan Tech, starting the following fall (fall 2021).
Michigan Tech
Michigan's Upper Peninsula has been and always will be my favorite place to be. Because of this, I immediately knew I wanted to go to Michigan Tech since I was a small kid. So in the fall of 2021, after graduating high school, I moved up to Houghton to start as a Robotics Engineering major at Tech.
My first year wasn't too much of interest beyond beginning my time working with the IT department, which I stayed with for a year. During that year, though, I rose to a fairly high leadership position where I worked a large portion on customer interaction and student management. Although I did like working there, I chose to move on at the end of December 2022 to work in a research lab which aligned with my end goal of research-oriented robotics development.
Research Lab, Part 1
Previously, in the fall semester of 2022, I met a new research professor, Dr. Tan Chen, and started helping him out in his lab. During that fall semester, while I was still with IT, it was more about setting foundations for the lab than full research contributions. This is where I started working with symmetrical neural networks for calculating half derivatives and integrals, helping build off of Dr. Chen's paper, A Symmetric Neural Network to Compute Fractional Derivatives by Training with Integer Derivatives. This work was put on hold for the spring semester as we started a new project on bipedal locomotion and gait correction on low-mu surfaces.
Robotics Systems Enterprise
More on this coming soon.
Research Lab, Part 2
More on this coming soon.
Post Michigan Tech
This is where I'm currently at… things are still getting figured out as we go along, but it's slowly getting written.