01 — Selected work

Things I built that shipped

Each one a problem, the approach, and what measurably changed as a result.

Power equipment
PS Electricals
2008 — 2010

Transformer and reactor design to IS / BS standards

Customer-specification design of power, earthing and distribution transformers and reactors — the full path from electrical specification to drawings the production floor builds from.

  • Designed distribution transformers up to 5 MVA at 33 kV / 11 kV / 433 V, producing core-cutting and winding instructions for manufacture.
  • Performed oil quantity and conservator selection, cooling calculation and radiator selection for ONAN, ONAF and AN configurations, with the bill of materials to match.
  • Designed internal arrangements and end-insulation arrangements, and produced the AutoCAD drawing set released to production.
  • Ran improvement studies on existing products and new designs against IS and BS standards.
MagneticsThermal designInsulation coordinationAutoCADIS / BS
Automotive
PathPartner Technologies
2022 — Aug 2024

3D Bowl View and the Virtual Wall — surround-view ADAS

Drivers get four fisheye camera feeds and have to infer where the car actually is. The feature stitches them into a single 3D scene the driver reads instantly, with obstacles raised as a vertical virtual wall so proximity is visible rather than inferred.

  • Built the 3D Bowl View projection in OpenGL ES, then extended it with a 3D Virtual Wall rendering detected obstacles as geometry around the vehicle.
  • Added dynamic tire guidelines and an animated wheel model tracking steering angle in real time, so the projected path is live rather than a static overlay.
  • Shared buffers between the CUDA detection pipeline and the GL renderer to avoid round-tripping frames through host memory.
40% improvement in system responsiveness after optimising the CUDA / OpenGL ES / ML integration.
OpenGL ESCUDAC++Renesas R-Car
Medical imaging
Appasamy Associates
2015 — 2022

OCT retinal imaging and analysis platform

Optical Coherence Tomography scans the retina in cross-section. Clinicians needed the volume reconstructed, segmented and rendered while the patient was still in the chair.

  • Built interactive 3D models of eye structures in OpenGL, rendered dynamically to show tissue change over time.
  • Accelerated deep-learning segmentation with cuDNN and cuBLAS, integrating inference directly with the GL visualisation.
  • Shipped real-time 3D visualization of intra-retinal layers — the layers that matter for macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.
  • Designed the Qt clinical interface around the 3D models and ML output.
Generation and rendering of 3D eye-tissue models dropped from minutes to a few seconds, moving the workflow from batch to interactive.
Qt 5.15CUDAcuDNNOpenGLOpenCVMATLAB
Machine vision
Mirror Technologies
2012 — 2015

Currency authentication and oil-seal inspection lines

Factory-floor vision and control with a hard constraint: the line does not stop, and the false-reject rate has to stay near zero.

  • Built a currency detection system in LabVIEW performing vision-based watermark and hologram verification.
  • Built oil-seal quality inspection and the control system around it — conveyor motors, focusing light, pneumatic solenoid valves, PLC and pressure switches — synchronising five systems' output data.
LabVIEWMachine visionPLCIndustrial control
Robotics
Mirror Technologies
2012 — 2015

Radiation-survey biped and a 600 kg material-handling robot

Two robots at opposite ends of the scale, both solving a don't-send-a-person-in-there problem.

  • Designed a 6-DOF bipedal walking robot to survey radiation levels inside a nuclear power plant, locating itself by GPS while sampling dose rate.
  • Designed a material-handling robot carrying clutch plates up to 600 kg, with ultrasonic sensing, high-current drive, GPS and proximity detection.
  • Built a Bluetooth home-automation system with its own Android app, and a NodeMCU/AVR smart controller for appliance automation and dimmer control.
Embedded CAVRNodeMCUHigh-current driveAndroid
02 — Research & innovation

Where I had to invent something

Applied engineering research: the parts of each project where the existing approach did not work and something had to be designed rather than selected.

Obstacle geometry inside a projected view

Surround view flattens the world onto a bowl, which destroys height information exactly where a driver needs it. Raising detected obstacles into vertical geometry — the Virtual Wall — restores depth without leaving the projection.

OpenGL ESProjection geometryADAS

Steering-coupled path prediction

Static overlays are wrong the moment the wheel turns. Coupling the guideline curvature to live steering input makes the projected path a prediction rather than a decoration, which is what makes it usable in tight manoeuvres.

Real-time renderingVehicle dynamics

A 7B language model inside an automotive budget

Running a 7-billion-parameter model on a vehicle SoC is a memory, latency and thermal problem before it is an accuracy problem. Getting it responsive enough for spoken control meant treating the whole pipeline as the unit of optimisation.

Llama 2Edge inferenceRenesas R-Car

Interactive volume reconstruction in clinic

Moving OCT reconstruction from minutes to seconds changed the workflow from batch review to something a clinician does with the patient still in the chair. That required inference and rendering to share memory rather than hand frames back and forth through the host.

CUDA/GL interopcuDNNQt

Interactive terrain shading at scale

Hillshade is traditionally pre-computed to raster tiles. Doing it per-frame on the GPU lets the sun angle become an input the analyst can move, which is a different tool entirely.

GLSLDEMRemote sensing

Evaluation design as an engineering discipline

Writing a problem with exactly one defensible answer, and a rubric that separates a correct solution from a convincing one, is the same rigour as safety-relevant design review applied to model training data.

CUDA-EVALAcceptance criteriaPeer review
03 — Products

Things that became products, not demos

Work that shipped to real users — patients, drivers, factory lines and paying tenants — and had to keep working afterwards.

OCT imaging analysis platform

A complete ophthalmic diagnostic application: acquisition, GPU-accelerated layer segmentation, interactive 3D reconstruction and the Qt clinical interface clinicians used daily. Deployed with the instrument.

Medical device softwareQtCUDAOpenGL

Surround-view ADAS feature set

3D Bowl View, Virtual Wall, dynamic tire guidelines and wheel animation, integrated into a production surround-view system on automotive silicon.

AutomotiveOpenGL ESRenesas R-Car

Machine-vision inspection systems

Currency watermark and hologram authentication, and oil-seal quality inspection with the full control system around it — conveyors, pneumatics, PLC and sensing synchronised into one data stream on a running line.

LabVIEWPLCIndustrial vision

Power equipment designs in service

Power, earthing and distribution transformers and reactors up to 5 MVA at 33 kV, released to production as manufacturing drawings, winding and core-cutting instructions and bills of material.

TransformersReactorsIS / BSAutoCAD

CNC cloud service and motion controller

A hosted service that validates, stores and dispatches G-code to networked machines, paired with a six-axis STM32H743 motion controller running grblHAL with a Wi-Fi co-processor link and Modbus spindle control.

STM32H743grblHALModbusFastAPI

Multi-tenant business platform

A private production estate of more than twenty web applications with its own identity provider, tenant isolation, self-hosted AI and native clients across Android, Windows and desktop — designed, built and operated end to end.

FastAPIPostgreSQLOIDC / SAMLKotlinQt 6
04 — Publications

Published work

Peer-reviewed engineering, in the same territory as the robotics and machine-vision projects above.

  1. April 2014

    Autonomous Bipedal Prototype for Visual Surface Inspection

    S. Rammurthy, H. Patel, S. Vinoth Kumar, N. Kumaran

    International Journal of Advances in Science, Engineering and Technology (IJASEAT) · ISSN 2321-9009 · Volume 2, Issue 2

    A bipedal robot for autonomous surface inspection, departing from the conventional wheeled and stem designs. Ultrasonic ranging supplies the obstacle avoidance that makes it autonomous, and an onboard wireless camera gives it machine vision — the same pairing of sensing and vision that runs through the inspection and survey robots elsewhere on this site.

    Bipedal roboticsUltrasonic rangingObstacle avoidanceMachine vision