Blake Dee

Rapid Autonomous Intervention Vehicle

Senior capstone project — an autonomous vehicle that homes on a target by detecting a strobe light, then hands off to operator control for precision maneuvering.

N-Class Hybrid Rockets

Propulsion lead for UCLA Rocket Project's Prometheus team — designed and test-fired five N-class SRAD hybrid engines, contributing to a 15,000 ft apogee (1.5× the prior collegiate record).

Talon 1400 FPV Fixed-Wing

A long-range FPV fixed-wing built on the Flightory Talon 1400 platform, with a fully custom electronics stack and a redesigned nosecone to mount a DJI FPV camera.

Nano-Gremlin

A sub-300g fixed-wing UAV with a restructured hull printed in LW PLA and custom electronics — built for low-altitude FPV flight.

Thrust Vectored Monocopter

Led a grad robotics team to build a thrust-vectored monocopter — inspired by Falcon 9 landing control but without the expendables. Hardware was too unstable to fly, so the project became a full PD-controlled simulator.

Jacobian Derivation & Kinematic Analysis

Full symbolic and numerical Jacobian derivation for a serial manipulator — singularity identification, manipulability ellipsoids, and workspace mapping in MATLAB.

Trajectory Generation for SCARA (Mitsubishi)

Joint-space and Cartesian-space trajectory generation on a Mitsubishi SCARA robot — cubic/quintic polynomials between waypoints and parabolic blends through via points.

6 DOF Robotic Manipulator

Built a six-degree-of-freedom serial robot arm from scratch — derived DH parameters, solved forward/inverse kinematics analytically, and characterized the workspace and singularities in MATLAB.

Lego-Building SCARA Robot

Led a SCARA robot build for a graduate robotics course — taken as a sophomore. Custom hardware, analytical IK from DH parameters, and trapezoidal velocity trajectories.

LIDAR Parachute Drag Study

An experiment to verify that increasing parachute surface area increases aerodynamic drag — using a LIDAR rangefinder to measure descent velocity across chutes of different sizes.

Lung Cancer Detection via Deep Learning

YOLOv3 applied to non-small cell lung cancer nodule detection in CT scans, trained on NIH Imaging Data Commons data to reduce diagnostic error and speed up radiologist workflows. Co-led with Robyn An.

Gretchen — 2DOF Gimbal Object Detection Robot

3D-printed 2DOF gimbal robot built at Seoul National University — uses color filtering, coordinate transforms, and YOLOv3 to detect, label, and track objects in real time.

Biomechanics of Acromioclavicular Joint Stability

Published research at the Orthopedic Biomechanics Lab, Pasadena — cadaveric testing of AC joint mechanics under simulated physiological loading.