Takuma Nakamura

Those who have no vision have no wings

Welcome!!

Hi. Thank you for visiting my website. My name is Takuma Nakamura. I am a Ph.D. student in the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. I’m working with Dr. Johnson and a bunch of amazing people in a lab called UAV Research Facility.

I started my undergraduate study at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan in 2009 and received a Bachelor of Engineering in Aerospace Engineering in March 2013. The following August, I joined the graduate study program in the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. I received a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in August 2015 and am continuing in the Ph.D. program.

My primary research interests include computer vision systems, sensor fusion, autonomous flight control for UAVs, six–degrees-of-freedom flight simulation and modeling. In the past, I developed many filters and vision systems mainly for visual target tracking. In the American Helicopter Society MAV Student Challenge, detecting a target and a helipad using vision was my work. In the DJI Developer Challenge, I coded a ROS node in C++ to estimate the position, velocity, and attitude of a moving platform. A part of this task was to import an AprilTag detection framework to our existing software. For International Aerial Robotics Competition, I developed a C/C++ quadrotor simulation to analyze a strategy. Also, detecting a moving ground target was my task. I’m working as a graduate research assistant in UAVRF, and I have obtained extensive experience in computer vision and sensor fusion through my work, research, coursework, and internship.

I am also a licensed FAA private pilot, and hobby drone operator. While I was an undergraduate student, I had an amazing opportunity to design, build, and pilot a human-powered airplane, and this would be what made me decide to become an aerospace engineer.

Enjoy my website! I’m looking forward to hearing from you!