Krispin Davies

An engineering manager at OTTO Motors by Rockwell Automation, I head the planning and tracking team developing self-driving software for our industry leading line of industrial material transport robots.
I have MSc and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Calgary (Canada), where I worked on multibody dynamics and nonlinear motion planning strategies for ground and aerial search and rescue robots.

In my off time, I love exploring far-off countries, hiking the off-beat paths of the rocky mountains, and playing the latest in open world action/survival games on PC.

Current Projects

Cricket 2.0

An updated version of the original Cricket, the mark 2 version trades the tank-style treads for wheels improving energy efficiency when traversing flat surfaces and refines the vehicle structure to optimize weight distribution.

kSim 2.0

The second generation of kSim brings the simulation suite into the modern age, introducing an improved architecture, modern C++ styling, and a generalized API for supporting multiple graphics engines.

Hurricane

The hurricane is a high payload vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle for medium-long range transport of sensors and supplies with little required operator interaction.

Academic Projects

Cricket

The Cricket urban search and rescue robot was an advanced quadrupedal ground vehicle designed to traverse complex collapsed terrain in the wake of disaster in order to locate trapped victims and deliver crucial medical supplies as needed.

TVQuad

The thrust vectoring (TV) quadrotor is a highly maneuverable high-payload vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle designed for short-medium range transport of sensors and supplies in and around critical regions in the wake of natural disasters.

kSim

kSim is a high-accuracy simulation environment for robotic vehicles supporting multi-body dynamics, finite element simulation of full or surface deformation, spring/damping effects, and OpenGL rendering.

Earlier Projects

UASA Hand

The under-actuated self-adaptive (UASA) robotic hand was developed to address the complexity, cost, and fragility issues of commercial hands by employing a single large motor, distributive gearing and passive spring/damper elements.

TESS Prototype

The Thermal Energy Storage System (TESS) is a prototype of technologies theorized by Christian Ohler, Daniel Chartouni, and Lindsey Westover to regulate power production from renewable sources (solar, wind, etc.) by storing energy during a surplus of then supplementing a lack of production as needed.

Haptic Forceps

An improvement over existing push-button surgical robot controls, the haptic forceps allow high-fidelity digital replication of the surface forces and textures that would be felt by surgical forceps during an operation.