Eric Fritz Email and Phone Number

Software Engineer at Project Kuiper

TA for BIOE123, an undergraduate mechatronics course

Designed fixturing for prototype product assemblyAssisted with prototype product builds and troubleshootingPerformed case studies for manufacturing feasibility of production plans

Prototyped UV curing methods and characterized the quality of curing. Designed and built a machine vision inspection station and wrote software for inspection

I returned to work on a minimally invasive surgical endoscope equipped with a miniature 3D camera. The 3D camera used a system of filter lenses and optics to produce 3D images using only a single imager, rather than the traditional dual camera system. The filters, being complementary to one another, were designed to only allow certain wavelengths to pass and reflect the rest.My task was to characterize the light passing through each filter and determine how much crosstalk was occurring between the two. Too much crosstalk will cause the stereovision to deteriorate. Tests were performed using only the filters and again using the camera optical system.

I am working in the rotorcraft department. My primary job is working towards publishing the UH-60A Airloads data report. In addition, I have written code to predict the displacement of air caused by blade tip vortices. In the 1990s, the most extensive tests to date were conducted on a UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter. The intent was to provide the technical community with data to improve their analyses and rotorcraft design.It has been decided to publish the UH-60A Airloads data in a NASA Technical Memorandum. The amount of data collected during the UH-60A Airloads Program is massive. It is estimated the data from a single point will require 7000 pages. The ultimate goal is to publish all the data points in a collection of data reports. My project is a continuation on an attempt to automate the process. To accomplish this, a script will extract the data from a single data point and organize it into spreadsheets. The spreadsheets will then be formatted and printed as a PDF file according to predetermined settings. The code will be capable of extracting and printing every data point, thus eliminating the need to examine each data point separately.

There is great interest in nanofiber research. Nanofibers have shown that a decrease in fiber diameter correlates with an increase in fiber strength. Because of this, low diameter, uniform fibers are greatly desired for manufacturing purposes.I was conducting research into silk polymer nanofibers, attempting to find a high strength, low diameter fiber to be used as medical scaffolds. Throughout my work, I synthesized the fibers using electrospinning and conducted mechanical tests on the fibers

Traditional stereoscopic vision (3D) is achieved through use of two separate cameras, arranged to emulate human eyes. This method works on large scale projects, but runs into problems on small scale designs, such as surgical endoscopes. This project is focused on developing a stereoscopic endoscope, using a single camera and Conjugated Multiple-Bandpass Filters (CMBF) to create stereoscopic vision. Each half of filter is built to allow a distinct spectrum through, while blocking the complementary spectrum. A system with different left and right filters can produce stereoscopic images.To accomplish this, the light must be filtered at the light source to match the filters at the camera. Additionally, the light source and camera must be synchronized in a way that each image will show only one filter spectrum. I worked towards building a prototype of the electo-optical system, measured the optical throughput, and recorded video produced by this method.