Background
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 writting 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 4 years of spanish, 2 years of psychology and 3 years of physics. Although it’s not much to note, 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 where I started in 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 orientated robotics developement.
Research Lab Part 1
Previously in that fall semester of 2022, I met a new research professor, Dr. Tan Chen, and I started helping him out in his lab. During the fall semester while I was still with IT, it was more of setting foundations for the lab and less of full research contributions. This is where I started working with symmetrical neural networks for calculating half derivatives and integrals to try and help build off of Dr. Chen’s paper, A Symmetric Neural Network to Compute Fractional Derivatives by Training with Integer Derivatives. This work was then put on hold for the spring semester as we started to work on a new project on bipedal locamotion and gate correction on low mu surfaces.
Robotics Systems Enterprise
Research Lab Part 2
Post Michigan Tech
This is where I’m currently at… Things are still getting figured out as we go along but its slowly getting written.