About Me

My name is Jacob Hartzer, and I am a Mechanical Engineering PhD Student. I am originally from Austin, Texas, and also attended Texas A&M for my undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering.

My background interests were originally in controls and dynamics, which has slowly led me to estimation and filtering. My past professional and research experience have also given me avenues to use coding skills to apply these interests to real-wrold problems

Current Research

Currently, I am working on applications of Kalman filtering towards calibration of online systems. I am working on characterizing the efficacy of these filters in generating intrinsic and extrinsic calibrations, as well as developing new techniques for accurate and computationally-light calibration.

Previous Work

Previously, I researched localization techniques for networks of autonomous vehicles. The goal of this work was to leverage the large number of vehicles within sensor range to increase localization accuracies of the network. During this effort, a lightweight Monte-Carlo simulation was developed that, alongside real world experimentation, validating collaborative localization algorithms as very good approximations of a centralized, full-state kalman filter. My thesis on this topic can be found on OakTrust.