Hello, I'm Collin Bolles, a research software engineer for SAIL at Boston University. My work entails mostly full stack web development for various research projects through Boston Univerity. While I'm mostly working on web development, my background also includes cloud computing and embedded development.
Projects I'm Currently Working on
Spatial Computing for Robotics Control Algorithms
VR and AR headsets are being more and more accessible to the average user. This new level of access opens up new methods for interacting with both the physical and digital world. This project being done for my masters thesis in robotics and autonomous systems leveraged AR technology to make resoning through robotics control alogorithms easier. The idea being that by leveraging AR platforms, digital concepts such as path planning way points, artifical potential fields, etc can be overlayed onto the physical world making it easier to debug and reason through the control algorithms. The platform involves a Meta Quest 3, cooresponding app written in Unity, ROS2 integration, and support for visualizations using rviz's marker system.
SignLab (Sign Language based Platform)
At SAIL I am currently working on a project called SignLab. SignLab is a tool designed to give researchers the ability to tag short videos. The intention is to produce a flexible enough tool that many researchers will be able to utilize the interface. The immediate goal is to support ASL based research involving tagging short videos containing signs based on the goals of the research study.
PREAA (LLM Workflows in Academia)
Generative AI has opened a new frontier in nearly every field, education being no exception. PREAA is a effort at SAIL funded by the Sloan foundation to develop a method for rapid creation of LLM based workflows to academia. The project involves leveraging existing open source tools and custom applications to make developing complex AI based system easier.
Previous Projects
Firmware Team Lead for the Electric Vehicle Team
EVT at RIT is a team dedicated to building and racing electric vehicles. As the firmware lead, I managed the software that is developed for the team.
A large part of my role was the development of "EVT-core" an embedded library to enable the firmware team to develop for the ST micrcontrollers used on the various boards required for the motorcycle system. EVT-core has allowed for the use of various I/O interfaces include CAN, i2c, SPI, UART as well as the various built in hardware features of the STM.
For more information on EVT-core, you can view the repository here or view the Read the Docs site here.
Battery Management System (BMS) Firmware for the Electric Vehicle Team
One of the critical systems on the DEV-1 (Dirt Electric Vehicle) project is the Battery Management System (BMS) which handles the health and safety of the custom battery pack. One of my roles on the team included the development of the firmware that runs on the BMS. Firmware developement for this project revolved around safety and reliability. If you are more interested in how the firmware operates, I encourage you to view the Read the Docs page.
Interests
- Robotics and autonomous systems
- Computer Vision
- Electric Vehicles
- Embedded development
- Cloud based computing
- UAVs
For information about me, feel free to check out my resume in this repo.