Kai Collins | Portfolio

Hey, I'm Kai.

I'm a Robotics MS / Mechanical Engineering BS student at WPI, interested in the intersection of mechanical design and software development for adaptive systems.

Check out my projects

About Me

I'm a senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute pursuing a combined Robotics MS and Mechanical Engineering BS, expecting to graduate with both degrees in 2027. I'm a multidisciplinary engineer at heart, I'm always working to broaden my understanding across multiple dimensions of a project.

I've built up hands-on experience through a co-op at a medical device company doing mechanical prototyping and analysis, alongside a range of personal projects + research spanning robotics, embedded systems, and AI. I love building things and figuring out how they work end to end.

My Work

Robotic Ankle-Toe Masters Thesis

An underactuated ankle-toe system design that controls the toe independently of the ankle using a single shared QDD actuator, aimed at powered toe/heel-strike for humanoid robots.

Robotic Manipulation Platform: 6-DOF Arm, Sim-to-Real, Chess Pick-and-Place

A 6-DOF robotic arm built from CAD through a full ROS2/MoveIt2 stack and a MuJoCo digital twin, targeting effective manipulation on high backlash, low-cost hardware only using wrist-mounted vision.

GR-0X Morphing Humanoid Upper Body Research Platform + VR teleoperation

A humanoid upper body that reconfigures its own morphology to fit the task at hand, teleoperated through VR with control that stays intuitive across every configuration. Full mechanical, embedded, and software stack built from scratch.

Dual Vector RAG AI TOEFL Writing Assistant

An AI writing evaluator for TOEFL/IELTS prep, built for a WPI IQP project. Combines semantic embedding and algorithmic vectorization with RAG to score essays against real rubrics.

Audio Reactive DMX Party Lighting

A 6,000-LED ceiling with individually addressable pixels, driven by real-time Python audio analysis and TouchDesigner visuals synced to the music.

Other / Old Projects

Robotic Arm FK & IK Solver

Flow Sim / Heat Analysis for CPU Waterblock

Robo-Parking Motion Planner

EBike + EDirtBike