I build autonomous systems and the interfaces that make them usable.

Two projects have most of my attention right now: One Thousand Drones, a defense R&D company building brain-to-swarm control, and Emotive Engine, an open-source animation runtime for expressive AI interfaces.

My company. A SAM.gov-registered defense research lab building Brain-to-Swarm: a non-invasive EEG interface that lets an operator supervise a drone swarm through motor imagery, paired with a safety layer and a training academy.

The public site ships with a live BioScale BCI demo, a technical brief on the three-part system, and a briefing-request flow. Built on Next.js 16, React 19, and TypeScript, deployed on Vercel.

• Site: onethousanddrones.com
• Academy: academy.onethousanddrones.com, an open hardware-engineering curriculum
• Open hardware: Hex Cluster, the printable carrier system our test boards live in, released CC BY 4.0
• Tooling: ee-calculators, the tested, MIT-licensed math behind the Academy's calculators

_{The Academy's flagship board. The drawing is generated from the board's own Gerber geometry, the render from its released 3D model.}

_{Hex Cluster, the carrier system those boards sit in. Dovetails on all six edges, so a tiled layout behaves as one rigid body. Free under CC BY 4.0.}

An open-source runtime that turns AI interfaces into expressive characters. You drive it with a natural-language feel() call, and it renders emotion as motion.

• 15 emotions and 180+ gestures
• 8 elemental shader systems with 160+ elemental gestures
• 3D WebGL path with custom GLSL: subsurface scattering, physically based materials, bloom
• Lightweight 2D Canvas path: particles, shape morphing, gaze tracking, mobile-optimized
• Framework-agnostic, working with React, Vue, or vanilla JS

npm install @joshtol/emotive-engine

Live demo: joshtol.github.io/emotive-engine · Repo: emotive-engine

I'm open to talking about autonomous systems, brain-computer interfaces, and hard interface problems.