How I Got Here
Warhammer and Halo got me hooked on exoskeletons before I knew the field existed.
I grew up on Warhammer and Halo, which is probably the honest answer for why exoskeletons pulled at me before I understood what the field actually was.
A robotics lab at Virginia Tech turned me down — the wake-up call to commit to the field.
In undergrad at Virginia Tech, I was doing fairly traditional mechanical engineering coursework, and I hadn't found my direction yet. I applied to a robotics lab and got rejected — I simply wasn't competitive enough at the time. That rejection turned out to be the reason I'm here now. It was the wake-up call I needed to actually commit to the field instead of drifting through it.
Two jobs off the path showed me what I was missing, so I built a mechatronics foundation in an embedded systems lab.
After graduating, I took a couple of jobs that didn't line up with what I wanted (see my work history), and realized how much I was missing to actually build an exoskeleton myself. At the time, I thought the gap was hardware, electronics, and control — full stop. So I took an embedded systems research position specifically to build that mechatronics foundation before going further.
At CMU's Metamobility Lab I learned exoskeleton control is about human intent and biomechanics, not only hardware and control theory.
I came to Carnegie Mellon to study control and close what I thought was the last gap. I ended up in the Metamobility Lab, and getting close to real exoskeleton hardware showed me the field is further from what I'd imagined than I expected — and that my three-part list was incomplete.
Exoskeleton control isn't automotive or humanoid control. It's not really about PID or nonlinear control theory the way I'd assumed — it's about mapping human intent into assistance, in real time, for a person who's wearing the result. And underneath all of it, you need to understand human biomechanics, not just hardware and software.
Hardware and control carry equal weight. Great hardware with bad control still feels inhuman to move in. Great control on the wrong hardware never reaches anyone.
That's the balance I'm building toward now — roughly 60% hardware, 40% control, combined.