Introduction & Bio

Welcome to the MARCO blog, and thanks for stopping by.

My name is Jacob Gregory, and I am a senior at Capitol Technology University graduating in fall 2017 with a Bachelor's Degree in Astronautical Engineering.  I am also a systems engineering intern at Goddard Space Flight Center, working on the ATLAS instrument for the ICESAT-2 mission.  My primary responsibility at Goddard is automating the process of trend data collection and organization, though occasionally I am asked to attend and present at meetings without making a complete fool of myself.

At a high level, MARCO is an optical array system meant to acquire a visible light target surface in its field of view, pick out different targets based on their colors, determine the relative attitude of the target surface, and return an approach trajectory that is useful to an autonomous vehicle.  A lot of different components and software nuances must come together for the deceptively complex tasks performed by MARCO to succeed, so please explore the other pages in the blog for more complete details and pictures.  

MARCO is my senior project, so expect consistent updates to this site at least until January 2018, at which time I will graduate and be subsequently thrust upon the adult world accompanied only by the knowledge I've acquired over my college years and tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt.

All jokes aside though, I view the development of MARCO as a great personal challenge and an opportunity to learn a lot about the ever-changing fields of computer vision, physical computing, and machine learning, among others.

I hope you enjoy reading about my progress, feel free to contact me with questions and I'll be happy to answer them as best I can.

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Preliminary Results and higher-order error sources

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