Posts by Collection

Awarded Second Place in the Graduate Research Day Poster Competition, organized by the Graduate School at Jordan University of Science and Technology, in recognition of outstanding research presentation.

Selected as a recipient of the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship for the 2026–27 academic year. The fellowship supports outstanding doctoral students during the final stage of their dissertation research and recognizes academic and research achievement. View the official list of fellows

Recipient of the Frederick E. Terman Award, presented by the Lyle School of Engineering at SMU in recognition of outstanding scholastic achievement and contributions to the engineering school community. The award honors the legacy of Dr. Frederick E. Terman and is given to graduate students who exemplify academic excellence and leadership.

Recognized with the Best Teaching Assistant Award from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Southern Methodist University for excellence in teaching laboratory sessions and enhancing students’ hands-on learning experience.

This is an item in your portfolio. It can be have images or nice text. If you name the file .md, it will be parsed as markdown. If you name the file .html, it will be parsed as HTML.

This paper presents an analysis of the precision of fingertip location for a 7 degrees of freedom (DOF) pneumatic haptic glove developed at SMU for 3D elastographic imaging virtual palpation.The 2D workspace for each finger and the 3D workspace for the glove are calculated from the actuator positions using closed-form expressions based on design geometry. The fingertip locations are measured using a 5-camera OptiTrack motion capture, and the results are compared with the fingertip positions obtained using the linear sensors integrated in the design of each finger joint.This work is an essential step in the development of a virtual palpation system of 3D elastographic medical images.

Pneumatic actuators exhibit strong nonlinearities and considerable uncertainties that include time-varying friction, making precise force tracking control challenging. This is exacerbated in small-scale cylinders, where internal friction can represent a significant percentage of the maximum output force. To address these issues, this paper presents an adaptive sliding mode control method with friction compensation (ASMC-FC). The controller integrates online parameter adaptation for managing slow-varying friction uncertainties with sliding mode control (SMC) to ensure robustness against unmodeled dynamics and rapidly changing uncertain parameters. Experimental validation is conducted on a double-acting, single-rod small pneumatic cylinder. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach offers better force tracking and increased robustness compared to standard SMC.

This paper presents the mechanical design and kinematic analysis of SMU Haptic Glove, which incorporates seven degrees of freedom (DOF) that are pneumatically actuated and developed for 3D elastographic imaging virtual palpation. This paper outlines the mechanical design of the SMU Haptic Glove The two-dimensional workspace for each finger and the glove’s three-dimensional workspace are determined from the actuator positions using closed-form expressions based on the design geometry and are measured using embedded linear sensors.

Haptic gloves require actuators capable of precise force trajectory tracking. Pneumatic actuators exhibit high force to weight ratio performance; however, their usage is often limited by high nonlinearities and friction-induced uncertainties. This study investigates the position and pressure-dependent static friction in small-scale pneumatic actuators. A new stiction model is proposed that explicitly incorporates these dependencies to accurately characterize static friction effects. In order to exploit this model, a sliding mode controller (SMC) with estimated friction compensation is developed and experimentally validated. When actuator force is estimated using pressure measurements, results show that incorporating the friction model significantly reduces amplitude errors compared to uncompensated control.

I guided senior students in experimental design, data acquisition, and system integration utilizing tools like LabVIEW. I offered comprehensive support for final projects and extended my mentorship beyond my formal duties, teaching students how to use Arduino-based platforms and encouraging them to apply these tools to develop their ideas.

Served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for the Control Systems Laboratory in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Southern Methodist University. Assisted in delivering hands-on laboratory sessions focused on fundamental control systems concepts, including system modeling, time-domain response, feedback control, and stability analysis. Students implemented and validated control algorithms using MATLAB/Simulink and Quanser hardware platforms, including the QUBE-Servo 3 and QAreo 2 systems.

I supported the design and testing of laboratory experiments prior to implementation and provided detailed feedback to enhance student learning.