Iris – Chief Engineer & Project Manager

About

Patrick is studying Mechanical Engineering and plans to graduate from the University of Notre Dame in 2025.

On campus, he aids young students as a a volunteer for the local VEX Robotics club and Fighting Irish Science Olympiad competition. He also is member of the Climbing Club and the Men’s Ultimate Frisbee A team, Papal Rage.

Patrick spent this summer (2023) doing research through the University of Notre Dame Wireless Institute under Dr. Scott Howard. This research surrounded working on a variety of interdisciplinary tasks with the goal of perfecting the Iris system. This involved improving upon each subsystem, testing through drone drops, and preparing for the NASA FLOATing DRAGON competition launch which takes place in August. A core aspect of his research revolved around developing a controls scheme to autonomously steer the servo-guided parafoil system from the 120,000 ft high-altitude balloon drop point to a specified waypoint on the ground. In doing this, he worked with Model Predictive Control, Model Free Control, and PID.

Patrick is originally from Menomonie, WI and now lives in O’Neill Hall.

His favorite IrishSat memory is spending a week in New Mexico integrating with NASA for the FLOATing DRAGON launch and hanging out with fellow IrishSat team member, Sarah.