I am Theron Boozer, a current Worcester Polytechnic Institute junior majoring in robotics engineering.
I graduate next spring with a bachelor's and a master’s, both in robotics.
I love robotics both as a major and as a hobby. Other interests of mine are ballroom dancing and woodworking.
Hobbies
I've been interested and involved with robotics most of my life.
In fourth and fifth grade, I participated in my school's FIRST Lego League (FLL) team, which combined my love for Lego and problem-solving.
During those same years, I joined a coding club and learned the basic logic of coding in Scratch. In middle school, I moved to working on a Vex Robotics team.
Our successes were few, but I learned a lot about time management. And in high school, I worked on the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team 2415, The WiredCats.
Here I learned a lot more about unstructured robotics and helped to design our team's custom swerve modules.
Throughout middle and high school, I took any engineering and computer science classes I could and continued robotics as a hobby, tinkering with Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos.
Unlike robotics, ballroom is a newer passion of mine, which I discovered during my senior year of high school.
My high school has a mini-mester where, for the first three weeks of January, everyone takes one specialized course.
In my senior year, I signed up for a ballroom class, in part because my physics and calculus teachers were the ones running it.
I ended up loving it and joined the WPI Ballroom Dance Team. Today, I still dance for the WPI team at the silver collegiate level.
My favorite style changes all the time based on routines, but currently, standard foxtrot is my favorite.
Education
I am currently a WPI junior pursuing a bachelor's and master's in robotics engineering.
I am on track to graduate in May of 2027, after four years of college.
I have been on WPI’s Dean's list every year.
I graduated from The Westminster Schools, a highly rigorous private school in Atlanta, Georgia, with a 96% GPA in 2023.
I was part of the National Honor Society and made the honor roll every year.
Experience
Currently, I work in the Automata Lab at WPI. I am working with a PHD student on creating underwater formation-controlled ROVs.
The Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) are set up in a leader-follower system with a boat leader.
The ROVs listen to precisely timed sonar pulses from the boat to know their relative positions.
The addition of the boat's GPS location allows the ROVs and boat to know their global position, which in turn allows for exact formation control.
In the first term of my junior year, I worked as the Industrial Robotics Lab Assistant.
RBE 4815: Industrial Robotics is a class at WPI focused on serial and parallel industrial robots.
As the lab assistant, I taught students to use the various arms used in the lab. We used the ABB1600, a UR5e, and a Fanuc M1iA delta robot.
The students had to use these robots for various tasks in labs, culminating in a project using Robot Studio to simulate various manufacturing scenes.
The summer after my freshman year of college, I interned at Kickr Design.
Kickr Design is a prototyping firm where I helped with several projects, as well as pursued a personal one.
While employed there, I assisted with both a car calibration system and an industrial fishing hook remover.
I helped with the assembly and testing processes with both, learning about mold casting and mass manufacturing.
