Farbod Haeri, Mechanical Engineer

I build things that have to work in the real world.

I work mostly in robotics and controls, and I care about actually building what I design instead of stopping at the CAD model. Right now most of that goes into a six-rotor drone I'm developing in Prof. Bewley's lab at UC San Diego.

UC San Diego BS/MS Mechanical Eng. San Diego, CA Focus: Robotics / Aerospace / Hardware

A few things I've designed, built, and coded, from a six-rotor drone to an automated neuroscience rig.

Fixed-Tilt Hexacopter

UAV Controls & Robotics · Bewley Lab, UCSD

Since 2026

CAD · Fabrication · Controls

A six-rotor drone whose rotors sit at fixed angles, so it can move in all six directions without a gimbal. It's meant for tracking a target and searching tight spaces like tunnels. I'm taking it from CAD to flight: the SolidWorks design, a 3D-printed monocoque airframe, thrust-stand testing of ducted vs. un-ducted props, and a 6-DoF flight controller that I tune in MATLAB and test in our motion-capture room.

SolidWorksMATLAB6-DoF Control3D PrintingUAV

View code on GitHub

The full automated mouse cognitive-training rig: two chambers, touchscreen modules, and the control box

Automated Mouse Cognitive-Training System

Senior Design · Jared Young Lab, UCSD

2026

Software / UI Engineer

My senior capstone for a UCSD neuroscience lab: an automated touchscreen rig that trains group-housed mice on the 5-choice task. I handled the software side of it, which meant an operator dashboard (HTML/CSS/JS) with live per-mouse metrics, a Python/Flask "brain" that runs through every training stage in order, and the data-logging plus the Wi-Fi/MQTT link to the hardware.

PythonFlaskJavaScriptMQTTState Machines

See the full breakdown · View code

MAE3 Autonomous Robot

1st Place · UCSD MAE3 Robot Competition

Fall 2024

Mechanical Lead

Led mechanical design on a small team: built the chassis and drivetrain from scratch and iterated through three revisions to take first place in the competition. The finished robot is in the gallery below.

CADMechanism DesignRapid Prototyping

Advanced Materials Metrology

Ghazinejad Lab, UCSD

2025

Test & Data Pipelines

Turning raw optical metrology into fatigue-life data for additively-manufactured steels. I built MATLAB pipelines that quantify defect fractions and surface roughness, designed and machined test fixtures, and ran fatigue tests across material variants while keeping the datasets clean and traceable.

MATLABMachine VisionMetrologyCNC / Waterjet

Numerical Methods Toolkit

MAE 107, UC San Diego · MATLAB

2025

MATLAB · Numerical Computing

A from-scratch set of the core numerical methods in MATLAB: ODE solvers (Euler and my own RK45), a shooting method, numerical integration (trapezoid and midpoint), finite-difference derivatives, and root finding (bisection and fixed-point iteration).

MATLABRK45IntegrationRoot Finding

View code on GitHub