Thomas Joseph Sullivan

I am currently a student at Rowan University in Glassboro New Jersey. At Rowan, I am a computer science major. In my spare time I enjoy fishing, snowboarding, and playing/watching most sports. The sports I enjoy the most are football, hockey, and basketball. 

While at Texas State University for this REU, I will be researching evolving neural networks, and applying them to a rover. This is an interesting topic, and is similar to the Google Car, but is actually better since the Google car needs to be driven manually along a path before driving itself. The evolving neural network implemented here should work better and learn its path while executing it. A simulation will first be created.

The rover will be attached with 3 sensors total, 1 in front and 2 on the sides. The plan is to have the sensors pick up objects in its way, move around them, and continue to the desired location. Once the rover is able to move around stationary obstacles, the last part of my research will be to have it adapt to an environment with moving obstacles.