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 many amazing people in a UAV Research Facility lab.

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 at Georgia Tech School of Aerospace Engineering. 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, my work was to detect a target and a helipad using vision. In the DJI Developer Challenge, I coded a ROS node in C++ to estimate a moving platform’s position, velocity, and attitude. A part of this task was to import an AprilTag detection framework to our existing software. I developed a C/C++ quadrotor simulation to analyze a strategy for the International Aerial Robotics Competition. 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. As an undergraduate student, I had the amazing opportunity to design, build, and pilot a human-powered airplane, which made me decide to become an aerospace engineer.

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