Over the course of summer 2023, Greensight hosted three Jumpstarters (Jumpstart: https://www.massrobotics.org/stem/jumpstart-fellowship/), Maysam Muhameid, Abigail Hiruy and Carlie Duverglas for a paid internship to learn from and assist our engineering team. Maysam and Abigail are upcoming highschool Juniors with aspirations of going into STEM and Carlee is a highschool Senior inbound to a Mechanical Engineering degree at Harvard.
Each Jumpstarter was paired with a mentor who they primarily shadowed. They also all received some exposure to each of the different disciplines with group learning activities. These included software & coding lessons, Mechanical CAD, and schematic and circuit design. They also assisted with image classification for machine learning
Maysam was mentored by Benjamin Boulch, one of Greensight’s Mechanical Engineers. She worked on various projects ranging from mechanical design work on electric motor generators, to industrial design prototyping for solar charging stations. The tasks involved in these projects touched on aspects designed to develop common skill-sets seen throughout engineering professions. As part of her work she created CAD models and generated drawings, rapidly-manufactured components through 3D printing, and assembled mockup prototypes of electric motor components.
Abigail was mentored by James Cosper, an Electrical Engineer. She assisted with a wide variety of projects ranging from Sensors, PCB design, soft robotics, and of course, drones; small palm-sized ones to drones with a 7ft wingspan. She was involved in the construction of many electrical assemblies, debugging of circuits, thermal testing, as well as some software. Abigail has a strong attention to detail and an aptitude for picking up new things. She was very quickly able to pick up skills and knowledge that allowed her to assist with various projects and board & wiring assemblies.
Carlee was mentored by Philip Andress, a Robotics & Control Systems Engineer. She had a particular interest in mechanical engineering which gave her a strong drive to solve practical mechanical design problems. She used this motivation in addition to her CAD and 3D printing skillset to aid in designing a variety of components for a novel drone system at Greensight. While working on this system she demonstrated her ability to plan out, refine, execute, and iterate on her designs. These projects exposed her to not only mechanical engineering, but also to the software and electrical engineering sides of the industry. Her primary day to day tasks involved designing and building mechanical components for a 70lb drone prototype that Greensight is developing. This involved communicating with engineers, ideating solutions, modeling potential designs in CAD, 3D printing prototypes, and iterating until all of the design requirements were met.
Their time at Greensight culminated in continuing the work of last year’s Jumpstarters - Seajelly. In the last few weeks of their internship, they were able to build and test a working prototype of Seajelly - an aquatics robot with soft actuators being developed by Greensight and Florida Atlantic University as a STEM education kit.
