About Neave Engineering
Keegan Neave
Keegan is the Founder and Chief Engineer of Neave Engineering Ltd, he has an eclectic set of skills and interests too long for this text field. Being raised on a diet of cartoons, movies, and shows about robots and artificial intelligence, Short Circuit, Transformers, and Knight Rider being prime examples, he has a lifelong love of invention.
Graduating from the University of Reading with a degree in Computer Science, working at Microsoft for six years in Developer Support, and a further seven years at the Satellite Applications Catapult as a Data Visualisation Engineer (and general maker of things) he decided it’s time to concentrate on his original childhood dream and founded this company to achieve it.
Robots.
Robotics
In 2019 Keegan entered a robotics competition called PiWars, the aim of which is to solve a series of challenges using a robot running a Raspberry Pi at its core. The robot for this competition was known as MacFeegle Prime, this was the first robot he’d built from scratch using Fusion 360 and using ROS and the learning curve was quite pronounced for both. Doing well in the virtual competition, this proved the skills could be learned, and the seed of Neave Engineering was planted.
Fast forward to 2021and Keegan had left the Satellite Applications Catapult to concentrate on Neave Engineering full time, with NE-Five as his competitor for PiWars 2021. NE-Five was designed from the ground up using lessons learned from MacFeegle Prime and all the CAD models, code, and supporting files will be released under the MIT Licence.
This robot runs on a Stereo Pi board with dual cameras, a Pi Zero runs in the base acting as the motor and servo controller. This robot will be used extensively to research and develop control systems for autonomous and teleoperation activities.
More information on this and other robotics projects can be found in the robotics portfolio.
Unity For Serious Games
In his time at the Satellite Applications Catapult Keegan worked primarily on visualising satellite derived datasets using the Unity games engine. This varied between point data, such as the position of every vessel on the planet using AIS, to remote sensing data such as NDVI and terrain data.
The last project, shown on the right, was Brigital that used satellite radar data to monitor the structure of bridges at millimetre scale.
More information on this project, and others, can be found in the Unity Portfolio.
Unity for Robotics
In recent years Unity have moved in to the robotics sector, supporting the Robot Operating System, and a number of other organisations having been working on projects using the engine for even longer. I am currently expanding my knowledge in this area, starting with creating a simulation of my robot, NE-Five, before introducing real time digital twinning of sensor and other data from the real robot. This will enable control and tasking of the robot in an intuitive interface but also the ability to render the environment the robot is operating in 3d in real time.
More information on the capabilities on Unity with ROS can be found here:
Robotics simulation in Unity is as easy as 1, 2, 3! | Unity Blog
I’m currently making exensive use of the Siemens ROS# project which includes a URDF editor built on Unity, more information can be found on their GitHub site here:
GitHub – siemens/ros-sharp: ROS# is a set of open source software libraries and tools in C# for communicating with ROS from .NET applications, in particular Unity3D
This is just a small set of examples of projects I’m working or have worked on, please get in touch if you have projects that you feel I could assist with and I’d be happy to discuss your requirements further.
