Five years of continuous service in NIST’s Sensing and Perception Systems Group, first as a Pathways / PREP Researcher and then as a Robotics Research Engineer. Work included calibration-target elements, repeatability-focused UAS drop-test hardware, FAA registration and Remote ID fleet compliance, and public technical publication. French Open-category A1/A3 competency — completed June 2022. French UAS operator registration through AlphaTango — completed June 2022. No Specific-category or SORA authorization is claimed. Contributed to ASTM E54.09 standards work through NIST by reviewing and updating ASTM E3132/E3132M-17 documentation in preparation for re-balloting.
Featured Projects
Selected work in robotics evaluation, test-method development, and applied software.
NIST Response Robot & UAS Test Methods
Contributed to emergency-response robot and UAS test methods at NIST across aerial, ground, and aquatic systems, including apparatus, scoring, standards-oriented documentation, and co-authored research on aerial drone tests for wildfire response.
RoboCup Brazil 2025 Arena Design
Designed a competition-grade robot-test arena through four CAD revisions, 27 renders, and two video walkthroughs in a roughly two-day design window.
LLM_Pipeline
Built a three-stage Python pipeline that turns PDFs and video into a traceable, RAG-ready corpus using OCR fallback, GPU-aware Whisper transcription, token-aware chunking, and SHA256 document IDs.
Selected Capabilities
Standard test-method development · Verification & validation · Repeatability-focused hardware · FAA Part 107 · UAV fleet management and Remote ID compliance · Robotics and UAS evaluation · Technical documentation · Python data engineering · Applied AI and computer vision · Embedded systems · CAD and simulation · Data analytics
Published Research
Fraley, A., Nowery, E., Devine, M., Jacoff, A., Oh, P. — “Adapting NIST Aerial Drone Tests for Thermal Identification, Inspection and Suppression of Wildfires.” NIST, published December 6, 2024; presented at the 2025 IEEE 14th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC 2025), Las Vegas, NV.
Co-authored with Nowery, Devine, Jacoff, and Oh. Read on nist.gov
Applied Software & AI
I build software for testing and evaluation: a three-stage Python corpus pipeline, a Jetson-based YOLO-OCR scorer for UAV video, a configurable Unreal Engine/JSBSim drone simulator, and ESP32 wireless prototypes.
Independent Engineering After NIST
Curiosell Systems LLC formed in April 2026, after NIST employment ended. Current work spans verified iOS products, PaintGrid Studio’s deterministic browser image-processing pipeline, DRONIEUS procedural CAD tooling, and other web and desktop engineering software.
Master of Science in Data Analytics (In Progress), University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC). Coursework includes applied machine learning and analytics. More on the About page
Get in Touch
Professional contact: alexfraley.aero@gmail.com. Open to robotics, UAS/autonomy, aerospace systems, systems integration, test engineering, V&V, and technical R&D opportunities.