 KasparBy Mark Vardy
Graduating with three prestigious awards, Aaron Kaspar is in the enviable position of having a plethora of career options to choose from. But after the years of intense study and hard work that led to an A+ graduating average, Kaspar said he is looking forward to some serious recreation.
“I don’t want to just dive into whatever comes up first. I want to step back and see what’s out there, what I can do, and what I’m interested in,” Kaspar says. “And I want to bike, and ski.”
Kaspar won the Governor General’s Silver Medal for top undergrad, the APEGBC Gold Medal for the highest graduating GPA amongst all BENG and BSENG graduates, and the IEEE Victoria Section Gold in Software Engineering.
Kaspar, who grew up around Fort St. John, capped off his degree in software engineering with a specialization in mechatronics, a relatively new field that incorporates electrical, mechanical and software engineering. For his final project, he designed and built an autonomous blimp with two other students.
“We had a helium-filled balloon, and then we had to build a gondola with a bunch of motors and sonar sensors and all sorts of things. And then we had to program it to fly straight down the hallway by itself,” Kaspar says.
Short videos embedded in Kaspar’s final report, which is posted online (search the UVic website for “Autoblimp” and “Kaspar” to find it), show a four-foot silver zeppelin navigating its way down the middle of a hallway.
“It sounds like a simple project, but just getting it to do that simple task is a lot of work,” says Kaspar. Indeed, his detailed report documents the minutiae his team were dealing with, such as the unacceptable lag time of several milliseconds that it took for waves bounced by sonar off the wall to travel back to the sensor. (They incorporated a system that allowed the Autoblimp to execute other tasks while waiting for input from the sonar.)
Kaspar enjoys mechatronics and will likely pursue it in the future. But while he sorts through career options, there’s something more immediate on his mind. He recently moved to Whistler for the skiing and mountain biking. “I love just going out for a ride for three hours and seeing where a trail goes,” Kaspar says. “That’s my goal for the summer—bike a whole lot.”
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