Santiago Brito

Hello! My name is Santiago Brito, and I am a graduate student in the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science department at Duke University. I am focusing in the areas of Robotics and Software and am really passionate how engineering can be applied to our day-to-day lives.

I earned my undergraduate degree at Duke University, where I studied Mechanical Engineering and completed the Aerospace Engineering Certificate.

Technical Projects

Bot-tender UR5 robotic arm project

During the Fall of 2022, I worked in a team of four graduate students developing a system that could simulate “being a bartender” using an RGBD camera for computer vision and a UR5 robotic arm for motion planning and physical actions. The goal of the project is to get the system to recognize a bottle in space, use those coordinates to grab it and ultimately pour it at a cup’s target location. My main focus during this project was the system integration using the ROS1 network, and the kinematics calculations of the end effector of the UR5 arm. For more information on the project, visit the following link:

Differential Robot: Finding the Fastest Path

During this semester, I had the opportunity of working in a Jetbot ant project. My goal during this project was to learn and implement diverse ways a robot could solve a maze by implementing different algorithms. I would like to continue some of this work by exploring more about the theory behind “graphs” (as described in Software Engineering), autonomous vehicles, and the relationship between the two. For more information on this project, visit the following link: