I was born in South Africa and attended the University of Cape Town, where I obtained my bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Cape TOwn. In 2009 I left for the United Kingdom to read a doctorate in computer science at the University of Oxford. I worked within the SUAAVE project under the supervision of Niki Trigoni. My dissertation investigated tracking pedestrians indoors using a combination of inertial and radio measurements.
In 2014 I joined University College London as a post-doctoral research associate, working as part of the CompLACS project. My role in the project was to test machine learning algorithms for controlling swarms of quadrotors. To achieve this I developed the CRATES experimental robotics framework, and successfully deployed model predictive controller on real platforms. In addition to this, I continued working on indoor pedestrian localization with Stephen Hailes and Jan Medvesek, using chirp spread-spectrum radios to obtain high fidelity range measurements.
Then, in 2015 I moved to the United States to take up a post-doctoral position in the Network and Embedded Systems Laboratory at the University of California Los Angeles. I worked in the ROSELINE project under the guidance of Mani Srivistava to develop a Quality of Time (QoT) stack for Linux. I also continued my work on indoor pedestrian localization with Paul Martin. Our work involved using measurements from ultra-wideband packet radios to perform a joint estimate of clock and position offsets, reducing the number of packets required to track multiple sensors.
In 2016 I moved to San Francisco to join the Astrobee flight software team at the NASA Ames Research Center, where I am currently employed. My work involves writing mobility software to control the robot, simulation software to help internal and external members test high-level control algorithms, drivers to control peripheral hardware devices like depth cameras, and sensor fusion software for ground truthing the robot and optimizing our sensor configuration.