Joleen Ng

I am most passionate in machine autonomy as I believe it has so much depth yet to be uncovered. As a mechanical engineer, I enjoy the thrill of design innovation - particularly, being able to analyze the flaws and strengths of various mechanical structures; and innovating or improving designs to overcome design flaws. As part of my vision, I believe there is much room for improvement in robotic design to aid fluidity and accuracy in movement. 

Despite majoring in Mechanical Engineering, I do not limit my skill sets to be within my field. As someone who actively seeks to set myself apart, I often take online courses to pick up new programming languages in my free time. I actively take part in competitions as well, including hackathons and ideathons. I particularly enjoy seeing my ideas come to life, especially when my ideas help to improve the life of others. For this reason, I have been actively engaging in various self-initiated projects – starting from junior college where I self-initiated and led a community project, to my university years where I have made a machine learning API for food wastage prediction, and a web-app, with back-end communication, to help student researchers easily connect with their desired target audiences. I have also met like-minded individuals from my second major, the Innovation and Design Program (IDP), and took part in team self-initiated projects, namely an Augmented Reality gesture interface, along with an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) interface, meant to innovate the way individuals with muscular deficiencies communicate, which our team has proudly won a 10K grant, sponsored by NUS Enterprise, to fund our project. Along with my peers from the Innovation and Design Program, we have also taken part in ideathons such as Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow and IDEATE 2021 organized by IDP. 

I have internship experience in autonomous systems, namely unmanned ground vehicles. I have worked at Defense, Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), which is Singapore’s largest defense company along with DSO National Laboratories, at their land systems department as a robotics intern. This experience has equipped me with knowledge in the testing and evaluation of mapping algorithms, use of industrial-standard sensors including Xsens, Leica, Marvelmind and Ouster LiDAR, and script programming in the Robot Operating System. I also took on interesting, light-hearted tasks like scripting the robot to dance, and architectural design. Additionally, I joined acquisition meetings with my higher-ups, which gave me insights into what huge companies look for when acquiring products from other companies, an insight I believe will be useful and transferable anywhere. 

I am a year 3 Mechanical Engineering student at National University of Singapore (NUS), specializing in Robotics, with a second major in Innovation and Design Program. I am also part of the University Scholars Program at NUS.