Lucas Wendland

Lucas Wendland is a sophomore at the College of Southern Maryland (CSM) majoring in Electrical Engineering. As a MATRIX Lab intern, he’s working on a project of his own creation that aims to expand upon the uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) space by creating a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based drone. His goal is to create a small, anti-jam autonomous drone with a custom flight controller and flight computer on a custom printed circuit board (PCB). Ultimately, he’d like the drone to be able to autonomously operate without GPS. He was interested in working at the MATRIX Lab because of its modern spaces and focus on autonomous systems.

Lucas’ research interests include robotics, and he is skilled in C++, ROS 2, Pytorch, Python, KiCad, LTSpice, and OpenCV. Outside of school, he is heavily involved in the ROS 2 ecospace, being part of the ROS 2 Core Libraries Working Group and creating open-source personal projects. In high school, he placed second in the state in the Maryland MESA Wearable Technology Challenge.

Lucas plans to graduate from CSM in Fall 2025 and attend the University of Maryland Clark School of Engineering at USMSM in Spring 2026. He would like to continue working closely with the MATRIX Lab as he continues his journey in the robotics field. He’d also like to see the beta version of his open source machine learning framework that works in tandem with ROS 2 be used in a professional setting before he graduates.