Available for robotics & aerospace roles

Mechanical Engineer · Robotics · Controls · Hardware

Farbod Haeri

I build machines that have to survive the real world.

I work in robotics and controls, and I don't stop at the CAD model. A design isn't finished until it flies, drives, or survives the test stand. Right now that means a six-rotor drone I'm developing in Prof. Bewley's lab at UC San Diego, with an autonomous car right behind it.

View Projects Resume (PDF) LinkedIn GitHub

6 DoFhexacopter I design & fly

1stUCSD robot competition

2 yrsApple hardware builds

M.S. '27UC San Diego

About

I'm a Mechanical Engineering graduate student at UC San Diego, focused on robotics, controls, and hardware. My work covers the full build cycle: CAD and CNC machining, control design in MATLAB, and the software that ties a system together.

Before UCSD I spent two years at Apple's Elk Grove facility supporting new-product builds across 500+ SKUs, and completed a student-engineer internship with the County of Sacramento, benchmarking energy use across 120+ buildings. Today I'm a graduate researcher in Prof. Thomas Bewley's lab, where I design, build, and fly a fully-actuated hexacopter, with an autonomous vehicle project underway this summer.

Quick Facts

Education: M.S. Mechanical Eng., UCSD
Graduation: M.S. 2027
Location: San Diego, CA
Strengths: CAD · Controls · Build
Award: 1st place, UCSD Robotics

The Build-Up

None of these happened in isolation. Each project made me hungry for a bigger one, from a single machined part to an aircraft with six motors and a mind of its own. Click any step and it opens right here: the story, the build, and the photos to prove it.

2024

Where it started

A working aluminum cannon, turned and milled in the machine shop.

Fall 2024

First-place robot

A competition robot built from scratch that took first place.

2025

Materials & metrology

Fatigue-life data pipelines in an advanced-materials lab.

2025/26

The software side

Numerical methods from scratch, then a full AI trading system.

2026

Lab systems

An automated neuroscience rig. I wrote the software that runs it.

2026

Built a drone

A fully-actuated hexacopter taken from CAD to flight-ready.

Now

Autonomous car

A self-driving car I'm building at UC San Diego: ROS 2, vision, controls.

Experience

Jan 2026 to present

Graduate Researcher, UAV Controls & Robotics

Prof. Thomas Bewley · UC San Diego

Designing and flying a fully-actuated fixed-tilt hexacopter: CAD, fabrication, propulsion testing, and 6-DoF flight control.

Aug 2025 to Dec 2025

Researcher, Advanced Materials & Metrology

Prof. Maziar Ghazinejad · UC San Diego

MATLAB metrology pipelines, machined test fixtures, and fatigue testing feeding fatigue-life models for AM steels.

May to Aug 2024

Student Engineer Intern

County of Sacramento

Benchmarked energy use across 120+ county buildings, scored efficiency, and flagged low performers for audit and reduction.

Jun 2022 to Apr 2024

Materials Manager

Apple · Elk Grove, CA

Two years inside new-product builds: kitted inventory across 500+ SKUs, flashed and tested production units, and cleared supply constraints to keep lines moving.

Skills

CAD / CAE

SolidWorksSimulationPDMFusion 360NXAutoCADANSYS (FEA)

Manufacturing

Manual + CNC LatheCNC MillWaterjetLaser CutterFDM 3D PrintingSoldering (THT + SMD)

Programming

PythonMATLABROS 2JavaHTML / CSS / JSFlaskGit / GitHub

Controls & Test

PIDState-Space / LQRLoop ShapingSensor FusionOptical MetrologyMachine Vision

Gallery

A few shots of the builds and the work behind them, including how the drone went from a bare frame to flight-ready. Tap any photo to enlarge it.

The drone mid-build, bare airframe with the flight controller exposed — During the build: bare airframe, electronics exposed, no props yet.

The finished drone from the side, props mounted and flight-ready — Finished: props on, fully wired, and flight-ready.

Farbod holding the finished hexacopter in the lab — The finished hexacopter, back in the lab where it was built.

The machined aluminum mini cannon with ball-bearing ammo — The machined aluminum cannon, where the hands-on work started.

The full automated mouse-training rig on the lab bench — The full automated mouse-training rig: chambers, touchscreens, and control box.

Top-down view of the hexacopter with green flight props on the optics bench — Green flight props on, top down, on the optics bench.

The yellow competition robot, full view — The competition robot, 3D-printed and built from scratch.

Cannon, side profile: turned barrel on a milled stand and base.

Two touchscreen modules joined by the transfer tube — Two touchscreen modules linked by the transfer tube.

The bare hexacopter airframe head-on, on a stool in the lab — The airframe head-on, between build sessions in the lab.

The robot with its first-place certificate — First place, Fall 2024.

The robot's arm, gear train, and drivetrain up close — The competition robot up close: gear train, arm, and drivetrain.

Presenting the senior design project at the showcase.

Machined Mini Cannon

Machine Shop Project · UC San Diego · 2024

CAD · CNC Machining

A team machine-shop build, and where I learned to actually make parts: a working scale cannon turned and milled from aluminum. We modeled every piece in SolidWorks, drew dimensioned and toleranced engineering drawings, then cut them on a manual lathe, a Tormach lathe, and Haas CNC mills before assembling and polishing the finished cannon.

SolidWorksLatheCNC MillGD&TDrawings

See the full build page

The finished machined aluminum cannon with ball-bearing ammo — The finished cannon, ball bearings for scale.

Side profile: turned barrel on the milled stand.

The SolidWorks CAD assembly of the cannon — The SolidWorks assembly it started from.

A dimensioned engineering drawing of the cannon barrel — One of the toleranced part drawings.

Autonomous Competition Robot

1st Place · UCSD Robot Design 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. Everything was designed in CAD, 3D-printed and laser-cut, and rebuilt as fast as testing broke it.

CADMechanism DesignRapid Prototyping

The yellow 3D-printed competition robot, full view — The robot, 3D-printed and built from scratch.

Advanced Materials Metrology

Ghazinejad Lab, UC San Diego · 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

Diagram of a three-point bend test on a beam — Three-point bending, the test behind the fatigue data.

The Software Side

Coursework + personal projects · 2025 to 2026

MATLAB · Python · AI Systems

Numerical Methods Toolkit · MATLAB

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).

StockAI · AI Trading Research System

A personal deep-dive into modern software and AI tooling: an automated trading research system that ingests public "smart money" signals (congressional trades, insider filings, 13F whales, activist positions), scores them, and paper-trades a risk-gated portfolio end to end, with backtesting behind every rule. The repo is private since it trades a live account, but I'm happy to walk through the architecture.

MATLABRK45PythonAI AgentsREST APIsBacktestingRisk Management

Numerical methods on GitHub

Illustration of a laptop running code — The software side of the toolbox.

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

Fixed-Tilt Hexacopter

UAV Controls & Robotics · Bewley Lab, UCSD · Since Jan 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 took it from CAD to a flight-ready build: 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