Sensor Rack for Drive.ai

Drive.ai was founded by Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was based in Mountain View CA. They were later acquired by Apple. While at Drive.ai, I worked on a number of projects and saw the company through a round of funding. Most of my time was spent designing and fabricating a modular roof rack capable of holding all the sensors used on the vehicle. This included a modular camera unit that could be placed around the vehicle and a set of precision lidar mounts that provide adustability.

The design for the roof rack was done in Solidworks and fabricated using rapid prototyping techniques. I also worked on a number of the electrical systems at Drive.ai including custom electronics for camera triggering. These used SMA cables and optical isolation methods to provide ground plane isolation and precision triggering for a set of cameras. Each camera on the vehicle is able to capture an image at the same time to enable the machine learning stack to capture the entire field of view at a constant time base.