Beverly Xu
Research Projects Portfolio

I am a second year undergraduate at Harvey Mudd College, studying Engineering with a focus on robotics.


I aim to build robots which automate repetitive, unsafe, and expensive labor in climate technology, to enable deployment at scale. This can look like improving loaded manipulator dexterity so robots can perform maintenance tasks on offshore wind turbines or solar farms, developing collision-resilient locomotion systems to navigate cluttered substations or mines, or designing a bio-inspired robotic fleet to monitor soil health with minimal disturbance of planting ridges.


Currently, I am developing a low-cost CO2 indicator with Dr. Julie Medero and Dr. Lelia Hawkins. Recently, I investigated legged locomotion over a novel, spring-loaded obstacle field with Dr. Feifei Qian.


Previously, I implemented two motion planners for hybrid dynamical systems with Dr. Nan Wang and Dr. Ricardo Sanfelice.


I enjoy contemporary dance, building IoT devices, and dark-roast coffee.

 profile photo

Research

  • Legged Locomotion Leveraging Spring-Loaded Obstacle Terrain

    Beverly Xu*, Feifei Qian.
    NSF REU 2026 view poster ↗

  • cHyRRT and cHySST: Two Motion Planning Tools for Hybrid Dynamical Systems

    Beverly Xu*, Nan Wang, Ricardo Sanfelice.
    IEEE CASE 2025 view paper ↗

Projects

  • Hydrophone Amplifier

    Designed a three-stage 25–40 kHz hydrophone signal amplifier with 20,000–120,000× adjustable gain for the Harvey Mudd RoboSub AUV. Includes DC bias stages to preserve signal through single-rail op-amps and protect Teensy ADC input, plus a low-pass filter to reduce motor noise. Designed schematic and layout in KiCAD; validated with LTSpice simulation before fabrication.

  • Mini Record Player

    Designed and bench-tested controls/power board for record sensing, audio, lighting, battery charging, and motor control. Includes ultrasonic distance sensor for record ID, music-synced LEDs, external flash, and speaker-amp, battery, and motor subcircuitsUsed KiCAD for schematic capture and PCB layout. Soldered SMD components onto bare board using stencil and reflow. Designed and laser cut enclosure.

  • Underwater Torpedo Launcher

    Designed a torpedo launcher for the RoboSub AUV using SolidWorks FEA and flow simulation to model force distribution and fluid dynamics under operational loads. Prototyped on a 3D printer, then manufactured a 2-inch diameter launcher using Fusion CAM and a DPM SX3P Bed Mill.

  • CO₂ Level Indicator

    Prototyped a CO₂ level indicator interfacing with an SCD41 sensor over I2C for the Lab for Investigations of Local Air Quality at Claremont. Designed an enclosure in SolidWorks using an edit-in-context assembly workflow. Wrote Linux, BASH, and IGOR scripts to transfer data in real-time to Firebase from PurpleAir and meteorological sensors running on legacy middleware.

bevxu [at] g [dot] hmc [dot] edu   |   resume   |   linkedin   |   github