Resume

Controls Engineer

Location:

Gainesville, FL

Posted:

November 11, 2011

Contact this candidate

Resume:

NIKHIL P. NIPHADKAR

*** ******* *******, *** # *, Gainesville, FL 32603

Phone 352-***-****

E-mail: iv9g49@r.postjobfree.com, iv9g49@r.postjobfree.com

OBJECTIVE

To obtain a full time position and make a strong contribution in the field of manufacturing, industrial automation and controls using my knowledge, experience and professional skills

EDUCATION

University of Florida (UF) Gainesville, FL (May 10)

M.S. in Mechanical Engineering GPA: 3.95/4

M.S. in Agricultural & Biological Engineering GPA: 3.60/4

University of Pune (UP) Pune, India (May 05)

B.E. in Mechanical Engineering GPA: 3.75/4

INDUSTRIAL WORK EXPERIENCE

Siddheshwar Industries Pvt. Ltd. Pune, India

Automation Engineer (Nov 06 – June 07)

• Explored the opportunities to convert various manual processes into automated ones.

• Member of a Component Development Team and was responsible for Fixtures Development

John Deere Equipment Pvt. Ltd. Pune, India

Graduate Trainee - Manufacturing Engineering (Aug 05 – Aug 06)

Special Achievements & Areas of responsibilities:

• Capacity ramp up project: Altered the layout of Transmission Focus Factory (T. F. F.) in order to improve production capacity. Alteration helped compressing the T. F. F. from 384 Sq. m. to 250 Sq. m

• Reduced the Transmission Performance testing time by 2.45 minutes per transmission

• Prepared the Demand at Capacity (DC) document (Capacity analysis and planning)

• Lead the team of 75, while establishing the line up & launch process to meet end customers’ requirement as a part of production planning activity, & trained the shift supervisors & operators for its efficient use.

• Planned, designed & developed mechanisms, fixtures & quality aids to reduce manufacturing cycle time & to enhance the safety of the operator.

RESEARCH WORK EXPERIENCE

Department of Applied Physiology & Kinesiology, University of Florida, USA

Research Engineer (Sep 10 - Aug 11)

• Supervised the fabrication of fixtures for research purposes. Two fixtures have been successfully fabricated and are presently being used in the ongoing research

• Programming a 2-degree of freedom (DOF) planer robot using MATLAB & SIMULINK

• Designed the experiments for analyzing the human motor behavior & helped creating the visual interface to display the response of the human subject on the screen

• Developed MATLAB programs and GUIs for human motor behavior research and trained doctoral students to use the robot for research

Agricultural Robotics & Mechatronics group (ARMg), University of Florida, USA

Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) (Aug 07 - May 10)

• Developed a technique to detect the smallest possible cankerous lesion using image processing, & computer vision techniques. Presented the exploration at the Annual International ASABE 2009 meeting.

• Developed an edge effect compensation algorithm to minimize misclassification rate of citrus fruits

• Explored if a two camera system with one RGB color camera and one CCD monochrome camera, can be used for citrus canker identification.

• Developed a fixture to view the bottom side of the citrus fruits to the camera, in order to analyze the citrus peel invisible to camera, for segregation of cankerous fruits on the packaging conveyor

SELECTED ACADEMIC PROJECTS

Designing the PID & LQR controllers for Osprey UAV (University of Florida)

• Designed the PID & LQR controllers for an Osprey UAV in order to obtain stability of the system and minimum rise time, % overshoot, & steady state error. The LQR controller design also included design of the observer.

Designing the Busch Garden ride (University of Florida)

• Designed a ride using forward & reverse velocity & acceleration analysis principles for the six degree of freedom robot manipulator

Designing a PLC ladder logic program for pick & place application (University of Florida)

• Designed a PLC program for FANUC six degree of freedom manipulator for pick and place application

Pattern Recognition Using MLP & SVM Networks (University of Florida)

• Experimented with few pattern recognition algorithms to study their functionality and limitations in recognition of test samples using MATLAB & applied that to a real life dataset of diseased citrus leaves to classify them according to their diseases

Special Purpose Machine (SPM) – Electro Hydraulic application (University of Pune)

• Developed an SPM to pierce rectangular slots on the periphery of the cup shaped work piece

Special Purpose Machine (SPM) – Automatic Weight wise Grading (University of Pune)

• Developed an SPM to grade the chickens according to their weight, automatically

PUBLICATIONS

Journal Papers

1. J. Qin, T. Burks, X. Zhao, N. Niphadkar, and M. Ritenour, “Development of a Two-band Spectral Imaging System for Real-time Citrus Canker Detection” Journal of Food Engineering (Elsevier), Accepted.

2. J. Qin, T. Burks, X. Zhao, and N. Niphadkar, “Hyperspectral Band Selection for Citrus Canker Detection using Multispectral Algorithms”, Transactions of the ASABE, Accepted.

3. N. Niphadkar, T. Burks, J. Qin, and M. Ritenour, “Estimation of Citrus Canker Lesion Size using Hyperspectral Reflectance Imaging”, Agricultural Engineering International: The CIGR Journal, in review.

4. N. Niphadkar, T. Burks, J. Qin, and M. Ritenour, “Compensation of Edge Effect on Images of Spherical Objects due to Light Source - Hyperspectral Imaging Application”, Agricultural Engineering International: The CIGR Journal, in review.

SKILLS

•Engineering Design Tools / Softwares: PRO/E, CATIA V5, Solidworks, AutoCAD, Simulink, ENVI, MS Office Suite

•Programming: Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), MATLAB, Lab VIEW, CNC coding (G, M code)

•Operating Systems: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Linux

ACHIEVEMENTS

•New Graduate students’ Achievement Award of University of Florida.

•Ranked 10th in the National level Robotics competition held at Indian Institute of Technology (I. I. T.) Bombay, out of 450 teams.

REFERENCES

•Dr. Thomas F. Burks

Associate Professor, University of Florida