Julian Haug

As SOP with quick rampup approached, it became obvious that a resident engineer is required to make things go smooth. I volunteered early and eagerly, despite I only just completed my formal probation period. Sensirion selected me for my technical qualification and suiting personality, to get the job done on the other side of the world. Bridging the cultural gap and the language barrier in little time, I brought the team together and soon everyone focused on getting production up and running. On the main site, challenges ranged from delayed & broken shipments over limited engineering capabilities to misaligned management. Meanwhile, two suppliers had to be developed from the first impression "they are not exactly a perfect fit" to "we consistently get high quality and volume". Of course, we missed the original SOP date under these circumstances. As our company committed to the business case, however, suppliers were strongly supported even from remote, and we finally caught up on deliveries during ramp-up phase. Finally, customer expectations were clearly surpassed.

I onboarded to the resident engineer role for the chance to live and work abroad for four months (neither too long nor too short). The technical responsibility alongside the high pace of the project and many suppliers with high stakes was very motivating. Formally, I was not to touch anything on the foreign equipment, and theoretically covering a role without tangible deliverables. However, I am proud to this day how all involved parties, counting over 50 heads, were brought from a stale, unresponsive and avoidant attitude to communicate openly, work proactively and cover huge gaps in project development in short time. So I felt to be really making a difference. Personally, it was a challenge to get accustomed, as many things could only be arranged locally, the official recommendation was to avoid the country for safety reasons, and our travel department hardly provided support. I think the trick to overcome all hurdles, was simply to stay calm, talk and understand the locals, and then strictly report and follow up on everything I found delicate. Besides work, I enjoyed a great time, thanks to the friendly Mexican people with an attitude for good food and social gatherings. I will take such an opportunity anytime again.

The hardware (incl. plenty of sensors and a retrofitted extra hydraulic circle) is called HEAP and was used to record data, and for deployment of controllers. Existing simulation models were detailed for extensive controller testing and tuning. Thanks to the framework, I could jump right into recording data, and prepare it for training. Of course, this turned out to be more involved than one might think(set up pipelines for recording, testing and deploying, understanding the data and application...) Finally the legwork was overcome and training could begin, primarily using robomimic and transformer models. Despite strong performance of the transformers in simulation, no model properly generalized enough to repeatedly excavate in a fine smooth motion. Due to time constraints, enlargement of the dataset was not possible and more extensive training could only be tested in simulation anymore. Meanwhile, more deterministic models performed better in shorter time, and the approach is more suitable for tasks which are hard to formalize.

Overall this started as a very promising project with technically savy supervisors and a lot of hacky and technical insights in the techstack and hardware. However, I had to realize the limitations of the approach and understand I have to properly adjust the planning of tests, evaluations and thesis itself. So for me, as a very ambitious and laborious person, this was a big learning to balance expectations against reality and resources. Also, I enjoyed planning the project and my time very freely.

The spaceport america cup (SPAC), held at Virgin Galactic's HQ and launchport, in the desert of New Mexico, has grown over the years from a small gathering to a real happening. The first generation of ARIS students elected this competition as their grand goal, worthy to be sponsored and hustled for. The specific category demanded to reach 10'000 feet as precisely as possible. Most teams had no specific control of their altitude, some teams had a very emprical approach to attach weights according to their rocket and the atmosphere. Our approach was to generalize, since we had limited testing possibilities, wanted to reuse the developments in future builds and also contribute something scientifically. Hence we came up with the airbrake system using drag force to reduce excess energy in flight. You may compare this to braking down a car when approaching a red traffic ligth: You just roll with the speed you have and you want to stand still at the stop line. We convinced the jury with our engineering and solid flight results. Our project ‘HEIDI’ reached 2nd rank in its category and 4th rank over all 123 international teams competing at SPAC.

I cannot remember how I freed up so much time andpushed through my Bachelor's thesis plus the usual coursework alongside the increasingly demanding engineering work. I just enjoyed working on the technical challenges, building up the rocket from A-Z and seeing the team pulling together so passionately. Also the project itself brought diverse learnings, from being a volunteering member, over leading a team to organizing the trip to New Mexico. Emotionally, I hardly believed we actually would fly the thing, until we did. So I really think back of a successful process, rather than the final competition only. (A firing only lasts 3 seconds anyway, and often the rocket is busted after that. In this sense, yes of course, SPAC was a blast)