From designing driverless cars to a promising career in academia

Kerry Kunlin He | Bachelor of Mechatronics Engineering (Honours) and Bachelor of Commerce

During his degree, when Kerry wasn’t studying he could always be found working with his teammates from Monash Motorsport, a globally top ranked student engineering team that designs, builds, and races formula-style racing cars. Their workshop, located in the state-of-the-art fabrication facility, Monash Makerspace, is where he was able to apply everything he was learning in his degree in Mechatronics Engineering.

As a high school student, Kerry enjoyed STEM subjects, especially mathematics. He also enjoyed creating simple video games and papercraft models. This all made studying engineering a natural choice. When the time came to apply for University, Kerry decided to study at Monash University, where he could study engineering from day one of his undergraduate studies. That same year he received the Engineering Excellence Scholarship, solidifying that this was the right decision for him.

After getting a taste of the ten specialisations offered at Monash during the common first year, Kerry pinpointed his areas of interest: Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and coding. Mechatronics Engineering, which involves the development of intelligent products or robots, felt like “the obvious path… to explore all these interests together”.

As an Autonomous Systems Engineer at Monash Motorsport, Kerry was involved in designing Australia’s first competition-ready Formula Student Driverless car. He describes his technical responsibilities as “developing the path planning and motion control algorithms - the decision making components of the driverless car”.

For Kerry’s final year project he designed and implemented "an algorithm which computed a trajectory which minimised lap times, and a controller which follows this trajectory by predicting how what it does now affects what it can do in the future". This was “the highlight” of his undergraduate studies and an “opportunity to explore [his] research interests”. Whilst on the team he also held multiple leadership positions, including Cost Event Leader, Head of Autonomous Systems, and Autonomous Systems Principal Engineer.

Kerry was awarded the Summer Research Program Scholarship twice, where he worked alongside leading academics and researchers, contributing to real research projects at the brand new premier research facility, Monash Robotics. As someone who showed an early interest in post-graduate studies, the Program provided a safe environment to “test the waters” and experience what it is like working in engineering research. His project involved designing a controller which would avoid occluding objects from the camera while simultaneously reaching towards a target. As a result, the humanoid robot that Kerry programmed solved the common issue many robotic arms faced of blocking the cameras mounted to their heads when grasping an object.

The experience led to a Research Assistant role in the Robotics lab, working on a project that trained a neural network on a simulated dataset to perform the task of using a robotic arm to place objects down in a natural orientation. For example, a mug should be placed with its base on the table so its contents don't spill out. “We were able to validate the network's performance in real-world experiments using a Franka Emika Panda robotic manipulator.” This is one of Kerry’s first publications in a reputable scientific journal, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L 2021) and he presented at the corresponding conference, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2021). He says “I enjoyed the research process and environment, and being able to make my first publication meant I was making contributions to the greater scientific community.”

It should be no surprise that after graduation, Kerry plans to continue his research and is aiming to pursue a PhD. His ultimate goal is to become a Professor of Engineering.

“The summer research project and final year project have both been extremely rewarding experiences, and have made me realise that I would really enjoy a career in research and academia. In addition, I also enjoy helping other students learn, having been a unit demonstrator in the past, which makes academia doubly suited to what I'm passionate about.”

Find out more about Bachelor of Engineering and what it’s like study engineering at Monash.

Follow the links to explore and learn more about Monash Motorsport, Monash Robotics and Summer Research Program.