Writing on engineering, software design, and motorsport.

Optimisation, inverse problems, and what noisy data teaches us about engineering

In professional motorsport, drivetrain parameters such as gear ratios and torque curves are known quantities. They are defined during design, validated in simulation, and measured on dynos. When analysing gearbox loading or shaft stresses, engineers typically start with the internal parameters and check them against reality.

But what if you only have the outside of the system?

My First Year Engineering Group Design Project

In my first year, I designed and built a two degree-of-freedom robotic arm controlled by C++ code running on an Arduino Uno. On the surface, it was a fairly typical introductory design project: design a mechanism, manufacture it, assemble it, and make it move between specified coordinates.

In reality, it became my first lesson in how intelligent control systems can compensate for imperfect hardware.