A personal lab for autonomy, robotics, and systems engineering — where control systems, simulation, and embedded software come together on real hardware.
View Projects on GitHub See HighlightsCole Tucker's personal projects in autonomy and robotics. Built, tested, and broken in interesting ways. The focus is on the full stack of autonomous systems, from low-level embedded control and real-time middleware, up through perception, planning, and simulation. Most work runs on ROS2, spans underwater and ground vehicles, and leans on open-source tooling wherever possible.
Common themes.
State estimation, and closed-loop control for autonomous vehicles.
ROS2, micro-ROS, and real-time DDS systems, from vehicle software stacks to upstream fixes.
Building the simulation, visualization, and dev-ops infrastructure that makes robotics teams faster.
Firmware, sensor integration, and hardware bring-up for custom vehicle platforms.
Torch based model development, using resnet and YOLO models.
A few of the systems that have come out of this workshop.
Most recent build: an autonomous racing platform spanning firmware, perception, and planning, tied together with a custom ROS2 / Micro-XRCE-DDS communication stack between vehicle and compute.
TBD Racer Project →A GPU-accelerated factor graph SLAM stack built around AprilTag detections, combining C++ and CUDA for real-time state estimation.
April Factor Graph →Led development of the ROS2-based software platform for OSU's autonomous underwater vehicle — among the first AUVs to compete internationally on ROS2.
OSU UWRT →Built the programming team's real-time path planning system from scratch, helping the team to its first regional win as alliance captain.
GitHub →A robotic system that detects and tracks a moving human target and throws to them — combining perception, prediction, and actuation.
GitHub →Upstream fixes and improvements across rosbag2, micro-ROS-Agent, and Cyclone DDS — covering re-indexing, cross-compilation, and real-time middleware.
GitHub →Questions about a project, or want to collaborate? Reach out.
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