Hello, I'm Syed Abraham Ahmed
A Computer Engineering (Co-op) undergraduate student at University of Manitoba. My experience is mainly in robotics, deep learning/genAI systems, systems engineering, and technical work in embedded, ROS2, and perception fields.
Previously, I interned at StandardAero, PTx Trimble, and the Canadian Grain Commission in software, and robotics roles.
Projects & Technical Work
Course / Apr 2026
Robotic Arm Color Sorter
ECE 4180 Introduction to Robotics project: a vision-guided robotic arm that detected colored cubes, calibrated workspace coordinates, and sorted blocks using camera feedback and arm control.
Project notes
- This was a very physical project: the camera view had to line up with the arm's coordinate frame closely enough that a color detection result could become a real pick target.
- Most of the useful debugging happened at the boundary between software and hardware, tuning lighting, workspace calibration, and motion assumptions until the arm behaved consistently.
- The final demo tied together the vision pipeline, coordinate conversion, and arm commands so the system could identify colored cubes and sort them on the table.
Course / Mar 2026
Stuart: The Smart Micromouse Maze Solver
ECE 4600 Capstone Project: an IEEE Micromouse-inspired robot combining embedded control, maze exploration, deterministic shortest-path solving, and reinforcement learning based fastest-path planning.
Project notes
- Stuart was built as a complete Micromouse-style capstone platform with a physical 8x8 maze, compact robot hardware, embedded motion control, and planning software.
- The planning stack compared a deterministic Dijkstra shortest-path baseline with a Maskable PPO policy trained to reduce traversal time using fewer turns and longer forward commands.
- The reinforcement learning environment used discrete, robot-shaped actions so policy outputs could be converted into compact commands for the embedded controller.
- The project won IEEE Winnipeg Section 1st Prize 2026 for the capstone.
Personal / Jan 2026
AbrahamGPT
Fine-tuned GPT-2 on message history with conversation context, preprocessing pipelines, and LLM-based evaluation.
Project notes
- AbrahamGPT started with turning messy message history into training data that kept enough conversation context around each reply.
- I fine-tuned GPT-2 because it was small enough to iterate on locally while still being expressive enough to pick up tone, phrasing, and repeated conversational habits.
- The evaluation loop compared generated replies for style and relevance, which was more useful than only watching training loss.
UMRT / Jan 2025
Project Perry Embedded Subsystem
Embedded subsystem development for the University of Manitoba Robotics Team's second rover, improving the single-board computer and microcontroller split for cleaner rover integration.
Project notes
- Project Perry improved the rover embedded architecture after the first platform showed which interfaces were awkward in practice.
- The system keeps high-level ROS2 work on the Jetson separate from microcontroller-managed I/O. CAN, UART, I2C, camera, GPS, motor, and power interfaces are laid out explicitly.
- The block diagram made the architecture easier to reason about during integration and easier for later UMRT contributors to pick up.
UMRT / Aug 2024
Prairie Pioneer
Inaugural rover built for the University of Manitoba Robotics Team's first Canadian International Rover Challenge entry in August 2024.
Project notes
- Prairie Pioneer was the first rover UMRT brought to competition, so the work covered team process, integration habits, and the robot itself.
- My work sat around systems and embedded integration, helping mechanical, electrical, and software decisions fit together well enough for field testing.
- The rover made it to the Canadian International Rover Challenge in August 2024, where UMRT placed 11th among 20 international teams in its first appearance.
Canadian Engineering Competition / Mar 2024
Hector Analysis: CEC 2024 Programming
Team Hector's eight-hour CEC 2024 programming entry: a Python/Tkinter tool for planning two offshore drilling rigs across 30 days of map data while balancing resource extraction against preservation impact.
Project notes
- The core challenge was making an eight-hour competition solution that could be inspected quickly. The Tkinter interface put the day slider, preservation choice, rig coordinates, collection totals, and map view in one place.
- Behind the interface, the data pipeline read 100x100 CSV maps across 30 days and normalized ocean cells while treating land as invalid for rig movement.
- The route optimizer was framed as a genetic algorithm, where an individual represented two 30-day rig paths and the fitness score balanced oil, metal, and helium gain against preservation damage.
Western Engineering Competition / Jan 2024
CogIN: WEC 2024 Full-Stack Prototype
Team Please Compile's WEC 2024 prototype for CogIN, a Winnipeg startup concept focused on supporting people with cognitive disabilities through scheduling, journaling, notifications, and caregiver visibility controls.
Project notes
- For WEC, we treated CogIN like a small product. The client needed a simple daily planner, while caregivers needed visibility without seeing everything by default.
- The backend is a Node/Express app with PostgreSQL queries for users, events, and journals, while the frontend uses Bootstrap screens for login, weekly review, daily modals, and editing.
- The public/private flags were a small but important design detail because they made caregiver access part of the data model rather than only a UI convention.
Personal / Aug 2023
Hydrogen Wavefunction Visualizer
Physics visualization project that computes hydrogen atom wavefunctions from quantum numbers n, l, and m_l, then plots real, imaginary, and probability-density contours.
Project notes
- The goal was to make the hydrogen wavefunction feel less abstract by turning the quantum numbers n, l, and m_l into actual shapes.
- The code computes the radial term with generalized Laguerre polynomials and Bohr-radius scaling, then combines it with the angular spherical-harmonic term from associated Legendre polynomials.
- The plots show the real component, imaginary component, and |psi|^2 probability density, which makes it easier to see how the math changes the orbital structure.
Personal / Aug 2023
Lorenz Attractor
SciPy ODE simulation of the Lorenz system showing how tiny perturbations in initial conditions split into visibly different chaotic trajectories.
Project notes
- This is a compact way to see chaos directly: ten trajectories start almost on top of each other and then visibly separate.
- The simulation uses SciPy's solve_ivp on the classic Lorenz parameters sigma=10, rho=28, and beta=8/3 over t=0..50.
- The Matplotlib animation keeps the 3D axes fixed on a dark scene, so the sensitive dependence on the 1e-4 initial perturbations is easy to follow.
UMSATS / May 2023
CDH-TSAT6 piCAM Camera Driver
STM32L4 camera driver work for TSAT-6's Command and Data Handling subsystem, bringing up the SkyFox Labs piCAM over UART, receiving image data with DMA, and converting the camera's ASCII payload into JPEG bytes.
Project notes
- The camera driver files started in March 2023 and reached board-level TSAT-6 integration by late May, with the final boardV1 commit unit-tested in the CDH repo.
- The driver handled the piCAM boot sequence, including temporarily disabling UART4 and controlling the ON/RX/TX lines so the camera did not bootstrap into the wrong state during power-up.
- For image capture, the code received fixed-length piCAM sentences through UART DMA, watched for the FACE terminator, then converted the ASCII hex payload into binary JPEG data in the static image buffer.
Awards & Publications
4th Place in Programming - Western Engineering Competition 2026
Western Engineering Student Societies, Jan 2026
1st Place in Programming - University of Manitoba Engineering Competition 2025
University of Manitoba Engineering Society, Oct 2025
1st Place in Senior Design - University of Manitoba Engineering Competition 2024
University of Manitoba Engineering Society, Oct 2024
1st Place in Programming - Canadian Engineering Competition 2024
Canadian Federation of Engineering Students, Mar 2024
cec-2024-programming-competition
2nd Place in Programming - Western Engineering Competition 2024
Western Engineering Student Societies, Jan 2024
pleasecompile-wec2024-cogin