Bradley Dennis
All photos were taken by me
Starting Freshman Year of College, I joined UMD Loop on the special projects team designing a workstation and a test track for the supposed SpaceX Hyperloop competition 5. That never came, so our team jumped to the first Not-A-Boring competition hosted by The Boring Company where I quickly became the Skeleton Subsystem Lead designing the steering mechanism and leading the design and integration of the rest of the subsystem. After competition, I moved into the Lead Mechanical Engineer position where I am now, and am working on designing and leading a large group of undergraduate engineers in new innovative mechanical and electrical designs including a brand new novel navigation mechanism.
After our first Not-A-Boring competition, I discovered a microfilm reel left in the corner of our workspace, untouched for over 50 years. I found it contained trajectory data from the Apollo 8 moon mission and went to work on analyzing the data using modern day tools and fitting it to my own simulations.
During the summer of 2021, I worked at Volvo Group Trucks, Hagerstown, where I collaborated with groups of engineers from both the US and Japan to map oil system responses to varying CCV orifice sizes. I drastically reduced data analysis time from months to near real time and worked to design and test a new non-intrusive valve lash measurement device for use in field research. I also created various professional reports and documentation that aims to save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next decade by reducing fuel usage in test cells.
Created a custom GUI and visualization using Python to perform forward and inverse kinematics for a given DH parameter table. I also designed and began construction of a entirely custom 6 degree of freedom robotic arm which utilizes my own 15:1 3D-printed cycloidal gearbox.
In my free time I love learning about and working with space, so two of my favorite hobbies are astrophotography and satellite image retrieval with an SDR. I am also a 5th year beekeeper and have been extracting honey from my own hives for the past few years.
