Malik Haider Ibtisam | Mechatronics and robotics engineer

Projects

Industrial project, Master's capstone, RMIT, 2024 to 2025

Motorised warp beam system for an automated trampoline manufacturing machine

Mr Trampoline's weaving machines still need an operator to hook and tension every warp yarn. With RMIT, the company is building a fully automated prototype, and my research covered its warp beams. An earlier moving-beam design had failed because the gear and rack were modelled badly, so I fixed the CAD, fabricated rack and pinion beam drives with stepper motors, and tested them. This phase delivered the mechanical base. Closed-loop tension control is the next stage.

What I found. A 2 mm error in rack height caused inconsistent gear mating, and moves that worked in CAD failed on the real frame because of tolerances.

My role. I ran the FMEA, redesigned the beams in CAD, fabricated and tested the beam drive, and chose the rack and pinion design. I assisted with the strain gauge calibration, the wiring and the Arduino code.

SolidWorks Arduino Stepper motors Rack and pinion FMEA

The finished beam drive: a stepper motor on a rack and linear rail

How the project unfolded

Semester 1

Attempt

Calibrated three strain gauges and tested tension with the roller motor.

Semester 1

Diagnose

The beams could not move, because the earlier gear and rack design jammed.

Semester 2

Redesign

Fixed the CAD and built rack and pinion beam drives with stepper motors.

Semester 2

Validate

Tested beam movement and repeatability on the real prototype.

Next Strain gauges on the moving beam, closed-loop tension control and integration with the XY robot.

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Personal project, working prototype

Self-calibrating thermal digital twin

A small-scale digital twin on an Arduino Uno and Simulink, built on the observer-based temperature control from my Master's coursework. The thermistor stands in for a machine bearing. Touching it simulates an anomaly, and running hot for a sustained period simulates wear.

dT/dt = k(T_amb - T_model) + L(T_measured - T_model)

Observer

A Luenberger-style observer keeps the model locked to the measured temperature.

Calibration

Recursive least squares tunes the cooling constant, only while the system is free cooling, with the estimate clamped to a safe range.

Alerts

A drift LED trips when model and measurement diverge, with debounce. A maintenance LED uses a timer to tell a brief spike from a sustained rise.

Disturbance

A fan on an L293D motor driver acts as a thermostat and a disturbance.

The thermal digital twin rig on a desk with the Simulink model open on the monitor behind it

Signal flow, simplified

Thermistor Observer model RLS calibration Drift and maintenance LEDs

Arduino Uno Simulink State observer ABB RobotStudioImage processingRecursive least squares L293D

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Coursework project

Collaborative robot relay mechanism

Two ABB robot arms in an ABB RobotStudio simulation

Two 3-DOF robot arms passing an object in a relay. I built the ABB RobotStudio simulation and did the arm modelling, and worked on motion control and trajectories in MATLAB and Simulink.

ABB RobotStudioMATLABSimulink

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Coursework project, team of two

Glaucoma detection from retinal images

A retinal fundus image next to the same image with the optic disc outlined in green and the cup in red

A MATLAB image-processing tool that measures the cup-to-disc ratio in retinal fundus images, uses two methods and takes the more conservative value, and sorts each image into a risk level. I wrote the primary code.

MATLABImage processingCup-to-disc ratio

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Final year project, GIKI

Thermoelectric battery thermal management system

The back of the prototype frame with heat sinks mounted on the thermoelectric coolers

A final year project that cools lithium iron phosphate batteries with thermoelectric coolers instead of a pump or compressor. I did the mathematical modelling and helped build the prototype.

Thermoelectric coolingSolidWorksCOMSOL

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