About Me

Hi!

I’m Ali Ahmadi, an M.Sc. student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Tehran. I’m interested in various fields both within and outside engineering. However, my primary research interests include control and dynamical systems, robotics and mechatronics, haptics, autonomous systems, human-robot interaction, clean and renewable energy systems, and the application of neural networks for the estimation and optimization of dynamical  systems. Currently, I am a research assistant and also lab coordinator at the “Intelligent Systems and Control Laboratory”, where I also work on my master’s thesis.

Ali Ahmadi

My Research and Academic Journey

At the time, I am mostly focused on my master’s thesis. It is an interdisciplinary project that includes control systems, biomechanics, dynamical modeling, neural networks, and machine vision. I am working on an active sports/rehabilitation device, and the task is to control and monitor forces in the human arm muscles during exercise. To do so, it is important to track the movements of the athlete or patient. Instead of using motion capture systems, which are common, I use a stereo camera setup that is more affordable and easier to use because it does not require experts to place markers on the client. This makes the system suitable for use in gyms, homes, and clinics. A precise model of the arm is also needed, incorporating properties and dynamics of muscles, bones, joints, and more. This model must be able to run in real-time to enable interaction with the device and control muscle forces. Next, by combining the client’s posture with the arm model, muscle forces are calculated and used in the control framework to determine the appropriate actuation in the device.

Besides my thesis, I collaborate with my lab-mates and students on other projects. One of the projects I am working on, together with my colleague, is to optimize fin ray soft robotic grippers. Our goal is to increase gripping force while also increasing tip displacement, which is a sign of better flexibility and the ability to grip objects of different shapes. However, these two objectives act in opposition to each other, and this is where the optimization problem lies. Our work is almost complete, and we hope to publish it in the near future.

I am highly interested in academic activities and teaching. I have served as a teaching assistant for several courses, including Statics, Dynamics, the Dynamics and Vibrations Laboratory, and Heat Transfer.

During my bachelor’s program, I joined the “Persian Gazelle Solar Electric Car Center,” where I also completed my bachelor’s project. My bachelor’s project focused on designing energy-harvesting shock absorbers for the Gazelle 4 car. The project involved selecting and designing the energy-harvesting mechanism, designing mechanical parts, modeling them in SolidWorks, and simulating the harvested power output. Simulations were conducted in MATLAB using different road profiles, and the results were promising.

I passed courses such as Advanced Control Systems, Adaptive Control Systems, Digital Control Systems Design, Fuzzy Systems, Optimization, Mechatronics, Renewable Energies, and Finite Element Methods (FEM). Alongside these courses, I completed various projects, including building a self-balancing cube, performing topology optimization of an industrial robot arm, designing a vertical mast lift and a thermoforming production line, stabilizing an inverted pendulum, controlling robot manipulators, and controlling a maglev system.

I completed two summer internships at the “Advanced Instrumentation Laboratory.” In my first internship, I worked on electric bicycles, contributing to market evaluation, specification selection, and the design process for cost-effective e-bikes. In my second internship, my responsibilities included installing, testing, and calibrating ultrasonic flowmeters at the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory. Additionally, I designed a cost-effective and easy-to-use stand for a mobile solar panel intended for use in rural areas.