Parsa Rezaei
17 projects

Research & projects

Mostly university work — lab research and competition entries — plus tools I build and maintain on my own. Grouped so you can tell which is which.

11 entries

Competition

NASA MINDS entries, built to a brief and judged against other teams. Four placed. A few stopped at a design review, and say so.

01AQUAD on grass, its pressure dome and red EDF thrusters visible
NASA MINDS 2025 - Exceptional Experimental Design

Air-and-Water Autonomous Vehicle

UAV & Robotics SystemsAgentic AI & Autonomy Tooling

AQUAD: a single vehicle that flies to a site, submerges, maneuvers underwater and returns to the air, on one charge. Built against a brief targeting ocean worlds such as Europa.

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02Close-up of the airframe during resonant power transfer testing, showing the coil driver electronics and wiring
NASA MINDS 2024 - Honorable Mention

Wireless Power and Data Transfer

UAV & Robotics Systems

Paired resonant Tesla coils beaming power and low-frequency data across a gap with no conductor between them, and the electromagnetic compatibility engineering needed to keep nearby avionics alive.

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03Parsa Rezaei beside the heavy-lift carrier quadcopter, showing its carbon arms, GPS module and flight controller
NASA MINDS 2024 - Finalist

Autonomous Aerial Docking and Recharge

UAV & Robotics SystemsAgentic AI & Autonomy Tooling

A heavy-lift carrier UAV acting as an airborne charging hub and data relay, letting micro-drones dock in flight to recharge, offload sensor data and borrow GPU cycles.

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04The morphing multirotor on grass, thruster pods and wiring mounted on servo-driven rails
NASA MINDS 2024 - Semi-Finalist

Morphing-Geometry Multirotor

UAV & Robotics Systems

A multirotor whose thruster pods pivot and slide on servo-driven rails, shifting from a wide-span cruise configuration to a compact footprint that fits through doorways and pipe racks.

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05Newtonian telescope tube mounted on the drone payload plate with its control electronics
NASA MINDS 2024 and 2025 · Team Kepler-22b · RSCL, Cal Poly Pomona

Airborne Observatory with On-Board Plate Solving

UAV & Robotics SystemsAgentic AI & Autonomy Tooling

A UAV that lifts a stabilized telescope clear of the worst of the atmosphere and works out what it is looking at on board, without needing a ground station in the loop.

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06Carbon-fiber hybrid vehicle with tank treads, four rotor arms and a Pixhawk flight controller
NASA MINDS · Team Gliese-514b · RSCL, Cal Poly Pomona

Air-and-Ground Hybrid Vehicle

UAV & Robotics Systems

One vehicle that drives across terrain it can cross and flies over terrain it cannot, with both propulsion systems sharing a single airframe, battery and controller.

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07Turing Pi 2.5 cluster board populated with RISC-V compute modules, powered up
NASA MINDS 2024 and 2025 · Teams Kepler-452b and Gliese-581d · RSCL

Post-Quantum Telemetry for Spacecraft Links

Agentic AI & Autonomy ToolingFPGA & Reconfigurable ComputingUAV & Robotics Systems

Encrypting and signing a live vehicle telemetry link with lattice cryptography, on RISC-V compute small enough and cheap enough to fly, inside a millisecond budget.

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08The lightweight-crypto ground vehicle with its encryption and actuator electronics
NASA MINDS · Team Kepler-1708b and successor build · RSCL

Encrypted Command Link for a Ground/Air Robot Pair

Agentic AI & Autonomy ToolingUAV & Robotics Systems

Ascon protecting the command channel between a ground vehicle and an aircraft, with an encrypted heartbeat that fails both vehicles safe the moment the link dies.

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09Computational airflow velocity field through the collector-emitter stages of the thruster
NASA MINDS Lunar Mission Challenge · Artemis Ionic Thruster · RSCL

Electrohydrodynamic Thruster Demonstrator

UAV & Robotics Systems

A solid-state propulsion demonstrator with no moving parts, producing thrust by accelerating ions through a high-voltage field instead of burning propellant.

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10Pulse-forming network module: parallel capacitor bank joined by copper bus bars
NASA MINDS · Team Kepler-138b · RSCL, Cal Poly Pomona

Electromagnetic Payload Launcher

UAV & Robotics Systems

A pulse-power launcher that throws a small glider or instrument package to terrain a rover cannot reach, using a capacitor bank rather than a propellant charge.

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11Fixed-wing solar UAV airframe on its assembly stand in the lab
NASA MINDS · RSCL, Cal Poly Pomona

Solar-Electric Fixed-Wing Endurance Platform

UAV & Robotics Systems

A fixed-wing UAV whose wing-mounted array charges the flight pack in the air, pushing endurance past what the battery alone would give.

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