Profile

Welcome! My name is Desmond, and here I'll be displaying my career journey, my portfolio, and my related content. I am a recent graduate of UCI, receiving my second bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with a specialization in semiconductors and optoelectronics. My coursework has given me experience in IC design, embedded systems, and hardware development. I am proficient in Cadence Virtuoso, SystemVerilog, Python, MATLAB, and circuit prototyping, with a project engineering background.

I am proud to say our senior capstone project, ‘Photon Flight’, was a Dean's Award winning fiber-optically controlled autonomous drone with onboard AI inference and autonomous flight capabilities. Please enjoy and reach out with any inquiries.

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Projects

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Photon Flight

Photon Flight 1

Designed and integrated a fiber-optic-tethered autonomous quadcopter platform for operation in RF-denied and GPS-degraded environments, enabling resilient navigation and communication without wireless dependency. Developed MAVLink telemetry pipeline and onboard AI inference engine achieving 75% object detection accuracy during controlled flight demonstrations exceeding 20 minutes of sustained operation. Performed notch filter analysis of flight log data in MATLAB and ArduPilot to identify noise sources in the control loop; optimized PID gains improving closed-loop stability and dynamic response by ~12%. Executed hardware integration and 3D modeling in SolidWorks.

MAVLinkArduPilotPID ControlAI InferenceSolidWorksMATLAB

Contact

github.com/d-bolialinkedin.com/in/desmond-bolia