Welcome to my Blog
5 mins Hello, my name is Alexis Guijarro and I am a robotics developer and an open source creator. I am from Mexico and yes, as a good mexican, I like street tacos, some buenos memes and a good time with comedy.
Although I am not very well know on the Internet, I’ve done sporadic contributions to Open Source projects by generating new code, workshops and translations.
That aside, I also have done small entries into Academia, mostly focused in autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAV) control.
To accomplish these achievements, it was necessary to dedicate enough time and effort to cover each required skill for this kind of multidisciplinary projects. For this reason, I’ve focused in multiple knowledge areas which go from solid mechanics and physics to programming, computer vision and control theory, among others.
I am a person driven by his passion to learn more, plus share it with other people. Since I had the opportunity, I was part of science fairs at the school and was in constant interaction with technology, this helped me to have a general idea of how things worked in this world.
Particularly, computers always were around my attention center, which usually absorbed me entirely and influenced my decisions to define my career path. I was (and still being) the computer nerd wherever I go, basically I knew how to break and fix them; although I could study Computer Science or Software Engineering (similar to my parents), I wanted to add a “little detour”, for each thing I programmed, it had to move.
That’s how I entered into Universidad La Salle Laguna to study Mechatronics Engineering and Control Process Systems, which helped me the necessary about multiple engineering fields to undertake my own projects.
Halfway through my bachelors, a desire emerged to make more complex projects, focusing on the programming field. Some examples of this was from the generation of interfaces for mobile devices for robots, to the flight control emulation and robotic arm manipulation, both with a Kinect camera.
The prior (among a lot lack of sleep nights) took me to get more into computer science, and consecutively it opened the doors to external projects from professors and contests, especially the ones that involved drone assembly and manipulation, as well as using computer vision to control these vehicles and other robotics systems.
Around the ending of getting my Bachelors degree, some classmates and me were invited by a professor to meet his friend (a professor as well) at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi in USA, where we would effectuate some experiments related to UAV and Computer Vision (yup, and you can’t imagine how much I enjoy playing with these topics).
After a very interesting month, eating cookies and noodles for some of those days (almost everyday), we achieved most of the experiments to show our skills. Later, we went back to Mexico with our new knowledge (like the utilization of Robot Operating System, ROS) and once we put it into practice we could won Second place at the 2018 Robotics National Tournament in Mexico, for the autonomous drones category. Aside this prize, we were considered as the best solution for that specific contest (rumors say that even we got more time to show off our approach). However, I didn’t feel complete yet, at least to say that I knew a 100% of it, and I started looking for more education.
My luck changed for good later when I obtained a proposal to do my Master degree in Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi, where “I took almost half of my house there” (as my ex-professor friend, now my mentor, said) inside a considerable amount of luggage. At that place I did a lot of new friends and acquire way more knowledge, also there is where I went all into research and more complex experiments.
I finished the Master degree in Computer Science in 2020 during pandemics contingency. A little bit later on that year, I moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I started my PhD in Electrical Engineering at New Mexico State University, after finishing my first semester I went back to Mexico to take break.
I hope you could follow me until this point and your coffee (tea or mate, I like them all) is not cold yet, don’t worry, we are about to finish since it only remains to tell you about what I’m covering in this blog.
In this space I will post my updates about my personal projects, also my contributions and thoughts on Open Source projects, by other side, I will analyze Internet articles and books for topics related to robotics (Sensors, Onboard Computers, Programming, Computer Vision and Machine Learning). Finally, if possible I will be reviewing robotics equipment and designing tutorials of how to use them, from hardware and software perspectives. I will give the best of me to keep an accessible difficulty for all levels.
My wish is to give you, the readers, a good piece of my knowledge and learning process at your disposal and accomplish it in the most informed way I can offer.
This is the very first time I write a blog and I really hope you can offer me some feedback, with this I will be able to improve your experience with my content. The delivery of each post is expected to take place every two weeks, since this is constrained to work load, there could be more publications in the same amount of time.
And that’s all! I hope you enjoy your/my new space and you find it useful to complete your projects. Do not hesitate in visiting my GitHub repositories, where I have several tools that I’ve been developing (and continue developing) for the community to use and improve them.
Stay tuned.