Oscar Jones - Mechatronics Engineer | Robotics & Control Systems

01 About

I've been drawn to how systems move and respond for as long as I can remember — it's what pushed me toward mechatronics. Through university I've built up a mix of control theory, embedded programming, mechanical design, and electronics that I enjoy pulling together on the same project, from the maths on paper through to something that actually runs on hardware.

I'm in my penultimate year of a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in Mechatronics and Medical Engineering at QUT. Alongside study I've been working part-time at Engdell since mid-2023, supporting control systems engineers through commissioning and instrumentation work on a large industrial project in North Queensland. I'm an Australian citizen and eligible for NV1 security clearance.

I've also put a lot of time into student engineering teams: leading industry outreach at the QUT Robotics Club, spending a year as the electrical and control systems lead on an internationally competing artificial heart project, and now running the post-landing robot arm effort on QUT's Mars rover team.

Quick facts

Degree: B.Eng (Hons), Mechatronics & Medical Engineering, QUT (2023–2027)
Focus areas: Robotics, control systems, embedded & systems programming
Currently: Post Landing Systems Lead, QUT ROAR Team (rover robot arm)
Also: Undergraduate Mechatronics Engineer at Engdell
Clearance: Australian citizen, eligible for NV1

02 Experience

Post Landing Systems Lead

Apr 2026 – Present

QUT ROAR Team (Remote Off-world Autonomous Rover) · Part-time

Leading a small team to improve the rover-mounted robot arm used in the post-landing phase of the Australian Rover Challenge — a simulated Mars mission. The arm needs to remotely operate keyboards, knobs and dials, connect a fuel hose, assess the lander for damage, and help navigate to supply caches. This work is in its early stages, with more technical detail to follow as the competition year progresses.

Undergraduate Mechatronics Engineer

Jul 2023 – Present

Engdell · Part-time · Woolloongabba, Brisbane (Hybrid)

Supporting control systems and electrical engineers on the Saint Elmo Project (a vanadium processing plant in Julia Creek, QLD) during design, installation and commissioning. Conducted loop checks and commissioned field instrumentation, verifying end-to-end signal integrity to the control system. Designed and delivered a floating pontoon system for a fire water skid — owning the work from concept through procurement, fabrication, work order creation and site deployment. Completed Rockwell's Studio 5000 Logix Designer training and have working knowledge of Siemens PLC environments. Also prepared inspection test reports and safe operating procedures, and reviewed colleagues' technical work.

PLC Programming (Rockwell / Siemens) Field Instrumentation & Loop Checking Commissioning

Electrical & Control Systems Engineer

Nov 2024 – Jan 2026

QUT Heartbeats · Internship · Brisbane

Technical lead for the electrical team on a student-built total artificial heart, competing internationally in the Heart Hackathon. Designed and tested circuits, selected components, and developed control strategies for safe and responsive operation — including control system modelling and implementation and hardware/software integration for precision system-level control. The team won the Best Newcomers Award at the Heart Hackathon 2025 Grand Finals (ISMCS convention, Austria), and Oscar represented the team alongside the Mechanical Systems Lead at SXSW Sydney.

Control System Modelling Circuit Design & Test Hardware/Software Integration

Industry Lead (prev. Executive)

Mar 2024 – Sep 2025

QUT Robotics Club · Part-time

Promoted from Executive to Industry Lead after just over six months. Led industry outreach and secured sponsorships (including the club's partnership with BPEQ), organised events, and helped expand the club's industry presence through strategic partnerships. Represented the club, alongside Sarah Norton, at the Australian Computer Society Tech Summit. Stepped down in late 2025 to focus more on technical projects.

03 Projects

A selection of robotics, control systems and systems-engineering work from university units, student teams and industry, roughly newest first.

Real-life photo of the completed autonomous robot with the 3DOF arm extended and gripper holding a test item

Side view of the robot showing how the full assembly fits within the 20x20x20cm envelope constraint

Bench test of the 3DOF robot arm and gripper prototype, wired up to a microcontroller

CAD render of the elbow-servo arm and modular gripper assembly

Close-up of the gripper holding a test item during a bench trial

Robotics · Mechanical & Electronics Design

Autonomous Pick & Place Robot

EGB320 (Mechatronics Design) · QUT

Owned the item collection subsystem of a TRL-3 autonomous warehouse robot: a 3-degree-of-freedom robotic arm and modular gripper (with an end-effector-mounted camera) able to retrieve items of different sizes from three shelf heights and deposit them at a packing station.

Chose a 3DOF elbow-servo arm over a heavier 6DOF design (and over a four-bar linkage) — trading some flexibility for better manoeuvrability in tight aisles, a wider range of motion, and better camera angling, all while fitting the whole robot inside a 20×20×20 cm envelope.
Used trigonometry rather than full inverse kinematics to compute joint angles for each of the three shelf heights, and worked through actuator torque requirements to size the servos correctly as limb lengths grew.
Iterated through CAD to "fail early" — an early milestone lacked lateral support on the actuators, which was resolved with laterally supported elbow and base joints in the next revision; a later torque issue (gripper claws lengthened for the largest item) was mitigated in the field with a tensioning band while a permanent fix was scoped.
Took the subsystem from CAD simulation through physical prototyping, lifting item-retrieval reliability to over 90% through gripper material and torque adjustments, and integrated it with the robot's mobility and vision subsystems.

CAD (SolidWorks) Servo Control Mechanical Design Systems Integration

controller.c

// Each car keeps its own connection info, name,
// floor limits, queue of stops, and current
// direction of travel.
typedef struct {
    int  socket;
    char name[32];
    char min_floor[8], max_floor[8];
    char status[16], current[8], dest[8];
    char queue[16][8];
    int  q_len, direction, split;
} Car;

/* When there are multiple cars available, the
   controller picks the first one in the list that
   can reach both floors — simple, and within the
   time available. A future iteration would instead
   minimise passenger wait time. */

Systems Programming · Control & Coordination

Multi-Process Elevator Control System

CAB403 (Systems Programming) · QUT

Built a five-component elevator control system in C for Linux, where independent processes — car, controller, call pad, internal controls and a safety system — coordinate in real time over POSIX shared memory and TCP/IP, exactly as a real embedded control system would need to.

Implemented safe concurrent access to shared memory using pthread mutexes and condition variables (process-shared, since multiple processes touch the same structure), avoiding CPU-wasting polling by waiting on condition variables instead.
Designed a custom length-prefixed TCP messaging protocol between the controller and each car/call pad, plus the controller's car-dispatch and queueing logic — including the constraint that a car must never collect a passenger while travelling in the wrong direction.
Wrote the safety-monitoring component to a higher, safety-critical standard (MISRA-C influenced): used write() instead of buffered printf() so status messages can't be lost if the process is terminated mid-buffer, and documented every deliberate deviation from safety-critical best practice in a header comment, with justification.

C POSIX Threads & Shared Memory TCP/IP Protocol Design Safety-Critical Software

Linearised state-space model

ẋ₁ = x₂
M₁ẋ₂ = u − D(x₂) − F_couple(x₁−x₃−L_c, x₂−x₄)
ẋ₃ = x₄
M₂ẋ₄ = D(x₄) + F_couple(x₁−x₃−L_c, x₂−x₄)

Controller

LQR with integral action, output clamping & anti-windup

Control Systems Design · Modelling & Simulation

Magnetic Levitation Train

EGH445 (Robotics & Autonomous Systems / Control) · QUT

Modelled and designed a control system for a two-carriage magnetic levitation train, where the carriages are connected by a coupler with linear and nonlinear spring/damping behaviour.

Derived the nonlinear equations of motion, linearised the system about a steady-state operating point, and built the resulting state-space and Jacobian representations.
Found the full-order system was not controllable — checked the rank of the controllability matrix, derived a reduced-order state representation, and confirmed full rank on the reduced model before proceeding.
Designed an LQR controller with integral action, then added output clamping and anti-integral-windup so the design would behave sensibly under saturation — optimising for reaching and holding cruise speed, staying within a passenger-comfort acceleration limit, and keeping the carriages from drifting apart.

MATLAB / Simulink LQR Control State-Space Modelling Linearisation

MATLAB plot of the closed-loop unit step response for the servo motor controller, showing settling time and overshoot annotations

Classical Control · Analysis & Design

Servo Motor Position Control

EGB345 (Control & Dynamic Systems) · QUT

A from-first-principles control design exercise on a real, system-identified servo motor: design a feedback controller for the identified plant model and validate the design analytically and in MATLAB.

Derived the closed-loop transfer function, the time-domain step response by partial-fraction expansion and inverse Laplace transform, and the analytical settling time and percentage overshoot for a range of controller gains.
Used root-locus methods to choose a gain achieving a 5% overshoot target, and to design a lead compensator that kept that performance when an unmodelled fast pole was introduced into the "true" system — testing the design's robustness to gain error and unmodelled dynamics.
Cross-checked every analytical result against MATLAB-generated step responses, closing the loop between hand calculation and simulation.

MATLAB Root-Locus Design Lead Compensation Transfer Functions

$Engineering drawing of the porous radial fracture fixation plate with dimensions and cross-sections$ $Four 3D-printed prototypes of the porous radial fracture fixation plate$

Medical Device Design · Biomechanics

Porous Radial Fracture Fixation Device

Medical Device Design Project · QUT

Five-person team project applying the Stanford Biodesign framework to design a porous, drug-eluting fracture fixation plate for the distal radius. The brief required working from clinical need identification through to a validated concept, which meant engaging seriously with how medical devices are actually designed and approved.

Led the biomechanical load analysis. No published load standard existed for the specific scenario, so I derived the design requirement from first principles (worst-case upper-limb loading), arriving at 650 N with a 2× safety factor. This is the kind of problem-solving the job requires when standards don't yet cover your application.
The project reinforced how early in the design process regulatory and validation thinking has to begin — identifying applicable standards, planning the structural validation pathway (ANSYS FEA), and understanding what a device needs to demonstrate before it gets anywhere near a patient.
Conducted the bone-site trade-off study across candidate fracture types and fixation approaches before committing to the distal radius plate concept.

Stanford Biodesign Framework Biomechanical Analysis Medical Device Regulation

04 Skills

Control & Systems

Control systems design (LQR, classical/root-locus, lead compensation), state-space modelling & linearisation, system identification, MATLAB/Simulink

Software & Embedded

C / C++, Python, embedded systems programming, POSIX threads & shared memory, TCP/IP protocol design, ROS2, Robotic Process Automation

Hardware & Industrial

PLC programming (Rockwell Studio 5000, Siemens), field instrumentation & loop checking, electrical & circuit design, commissioning

Design & Delivery

CAD & mechanical design, systems design & integration, project management, technical documentation, multidisciplinary team leadership

05 Let's talk

I'm an Australian citizen based in Brisbane, eligible for NV1 security clearance, and currently looking for opportunities in robotics, autonomous systems, control systems, or R&D engineering, on-site, hybrid or remote.

✉ oscarjoneswork@gmail.com in linkedin.com/in/oscarjones1 ⌥ github.com/Oskeeez ⬇ Download my CV (PDF)

Penultimate-year mechatronics engineer, focused on robotics and control systems.