2015

Team UAV Pals

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 22:11:28 +0000

Team UAV Pals Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 16:11

The goal of our capstone project is to develop an unmanned aerial vehicle that can autonomously navigate an unknown environment while simultaneously creating a 2D map. This 2D map will be streamed in real time to a host computer that communicates with the vehicle over Wi-Fi. This makes the system extremely useful as a means of determining the layout of a potentially dangerous environment without risking human life.

The system consists entirely of off-the-shelf hardware, much of which uses open source software. Additionally, a large amount of our software consists of manipulating Robot Operating System (ROS) nodes which are also open source. By using off-the-shelf hardware and open source software we are able to avoid spending large amounts of time working on low level details. This lets us spend the majority of our time developing the complex flight algorithm necessary for the system to navigate the environment in a safe and time efficient manner.

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Team SkiTron

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 22:09:33 +0000

Team SkiTron Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 16:09

The SkiTron system will consist of three components, a Heads Up Display (HUD), a wrist mounted controller, and a smartphone application. The system will take user information from the phone such as incoming calls and texts, current music, speed, altitude, and location and overlay this information with their field of view using a polarizing beam splitting cube (similar to Google Glass). This way the display does not distract them from the terrain. This display system will be mounted to user goggles to ensure compatibility with the majority of goggle manufacturers.

The wrist mounted controller will consist of four large, tactile buttons that can be easily pressed using gloves or mittens. They will allow the user to control the system by answering calls, changing the information displayed on the HUD, or sending a voice message to their skiing group. With the SkiTron Heads Up Display system, skiers can focus on their day on the mountain, without wasting time checking their smartphones.

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Team ReVolt

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 22:07:34 +0000

Team ReVolt Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 16:07

Repetition is important for retaining information. Many people put notes on their bathroom mirrors to remind themselves of important events, details and tasks. This can be messy and, of course, relies on the user to remember to write the reminder in the first place. Our project, Alfred, takes this concept and digitizes it to create an Internet enabled smart mirror that can sync with user Google accounts to display reminders, messages and other information.

Alfred uses facial recognition to automatically identify and log in users. It also features a touchscreen and a backup button array to allow the user to interact with the mirror. The mirror will also display local weather information gathered from an external solar-powered weather box, which is connected to the system via Bluetooth.

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Team The Electric Express

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 22:05:22 +0000

Team The Electric Express Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 16:05

Fuel cost is a significant expense to dirt bike riders, and gas powered dirt bikes produce large amounts of carbon emission that pollute the environment. Our project is to convert a gas- powered dirt bike into an electric powered dirt bike. By doing so, we can eliminate fuel cost and reduce the carbon footprint of dirt bike riding.

The scope of this project is to have the dirt bike be completely driven by an electric motor. The key components of this product consist of four 12-volt batteries, an electric key ignition switch, a 48-volt brushless DC motor, throttle grip with a built in battery indicator, mechanical hand brake levers and a speedometer LCD screen. The four batteries are connected in series to create 48- volt battery system to drive the BLDC motor. The amount of voltage being supplied to the BLDC motor depends on how much voltage is being drawn from the batteries. The electric key ignition switch allows voltage to be supplied to the motor and also cuts the voltage from being supplied to the motor. The user can twist the throttle grip to increase the armature voltage that is being supplied to the motor. The throttle grip also has a built in battery indicator that allows the user to monitor the battery life while riding. The mechanical hand brake lever operates the mechanical drum brakes on two of the tires on the dirt bike to decrease the rotational motion of the bike. The speedometer LCD screen displays the speed of the dirt bike while riding.

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Team The League of Extraordinary Engineers

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 22:02:26 +0000

Team The League of Extraordinary Engineers Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 16:02

Wireless charging of electric vehicles is attracting attention within many technologically advanced countries, and we find the idea of dynamic wireless charging particularly exciting. In a dynamic charging system, an electric vehicle would be able to receive power while in motion, in stop-and-go traffic, or while parked. Intuitively, these alternatives introduce tradeoffs where one must weigh power transfer efficiency against user convenience. The standard approach to vehicle wireless power transfer is to use inductive coupling between coils placed under the roadway and coils within the vehicle, but these systems require expensive ferrite cores and magnetic flux shielding. Instead, we are interested in using capacitive coupling of charging plates placed under the road surface and along the length of the electric vehicle due to the potential benefits of such a system including cost, size, and reduced electromagnetic radiation. Prior work on capacitive wireless power transfer has been focused on relatively low- power applications such as smart device or implantable medical device charging, and little work has been done in the area of electric vehicle capacitive charging. Our objective is to implement a one-tenth scale model of a capacitive wireless power transfer system for electric vehicles. We intend to use a remote-controlled car mounted with charging plates which are coupled with charging plates placed below the vehicle, and the goal is to transmit power from the road system to the vehicle system as efficiently as possible. Furthermore, our system will be dynamic, activating or deactivating road plates as soon as the remote-controlled car is present above the plates or subsequently leaves the charging zone, respectively. Important power transfer and power efficiency data will be recorded, and mathematical models will help us investigate whether or not our system is scalable to a larger form-factor.

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Team SkinLapZ

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 21:59:45 +0000

Team SkinLapZ Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 15:59

SKINlapZ is a proof-of-concept product to make laser tattoo removal a robotic system. The state of the art entails a licensed provider guiding a specialized laser by hand at a fixed height over the patient's tattoo in a procedure that is expensive and generally not covered by insurance. SKINlapZ allows one licensed provider to supervise a comparable or better procedure on multiple patients, providing economies of scale to reduce the cost and improve patient access while increasing throughput for licensed providers.

Using a simulated tattooed human limb, SKINlapZ emulates the by-hand procedure. The body part is firmly affixed in the robot workspace and a digital image is taken of the tattooed area. Image processing software determines pixel coordinates of pigmented vs. non-pigmented regions, and since the limb is affixed throughout the process, these data are readily translated into distance coordinates in the physical workspace of the robot. In addition to precise instrument calibration, closed-loop control uses positional feedback as the robot moves in sequence to pigmented regions of the simulated tattoo. Upon reaching each respective region, the robot adjusts the height of the simulated medical laser lens above the surface to ensure the correct amount of laser energy is being delivered for the prescribed amount of time.

SKINlapZTM is a patent pending technology which holds great potential to revolutionize a fairly common, yet very costly cosmetic medical procedure for laser tattoo removal. SKINlapZ is scalable to a variety of body parts with the same basic process to yield predictable results to help reduce the number of sessions required and provide further costs savings and throughput enhancement. SKINlapZ is a patent pending technology with the potential to improve a fairly common, yet costly cosmetic procedure.

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Team Power Monkeys

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 21:56:31 +0000

Team Power Monkeys Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 15:56

The problem with battery powered devices is that runtime is dependent on battery capacity. Battery powered devices that can travel outside a reachable distance for users require retrieval or to be navigated back to the user before the battery runs out of energy. Resolving this issue requires an implementation of wireless power transfer and rectification. In our special environmental case we can also use the archeological cave as a waveguide; concentrating the RF waveform reducing dispersion. Installing power management circuitry onboard UAVs, researchers can travel deeply into caves using wireless power to efficiently recharge the system and successfully recover and extend explorations with the drone.

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Team Photonically Optimized Embedded Microprocessors (POEM)

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 21:54:23 +0000

Team Photonically Optimized Embedded Microprocessors (POEM) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 15:54

Based on observation of exponential growth of number of transistors on an integrated circuit chip, Moore's Law predicted in 1965 that transistors will halve in size every 18 months. Although this phenomenon has proven correct for half a century and transistors continue to grow exponentially smaller, due to constraints in the buildup of heat that occurs when powering many densely packed transistors, new frontiers of electrical engineering must be explored to allow for Moore's Law to continue into the future.

Current research efforts in nanophotonics, such as the Photonically Optimized Embedded Microprocessors (POEM) program, propose using light, instead of electrical wires, in microprocessors to communicate with transistors, which could lead to extremely energy efficient computing for use in everyday electronics such as laptops and smartphones, supercomputing applications where high computing speed is desired, and military platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites where low power is a necessity. Specifically, these efforts focus on addressing electrical communication link limitations by developing integrated photonic technology to enable seamless intra-chip and off-chip photonic communications that provide high bandwidth and low energy per bit transmission. To allow for the use of current fabrication facilities and decrease overhead cost of implementation, this technology is designed for fabrication in both the silicon on insulator (SOI) and bulk complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes, the current prevalent microelectronics fabrication methods, which will allow for complete integration with all aspects of current microcontroller design.

In order to achieve this high bandwidth, low energy communication, nanophotonic devices, the building blocks of this proposed communication link, must be designed efficiently using electromagnetic numerical solvers. One of these main nanophotonic devices, and the product of this focused aspect of the larger POEM project, is the grating coupler which radiates light from an on-chip waveguide into an out-of-plane optical fiber. Previous research efforts have enabled the design of grating couplers that are highly inefficient and cause significant power loss compromising the effectiveness of the entire communication link system. This project focuses on solving the problem of grating coupler inefficiency and results in the design and manufacturing of an ultra-efficient grating coupler in both the SOI and bulk CMOS processes. These results of this project will dramatically contribute to the energy efficiency of future photonic communication links.

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Team Turn Down for Watt

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 21:52:11 +0000

Team Turn Down for Watt Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 15:52

The goal of our project is to produce an air hockey opponent with artificial intelligence that can competitively play against any user. Recently, older tabletop games have been remodeled and engineered to include robotics. This allows the user to feel as if they are playing against another human player which eliminates the dependency of game play on the presence of another person.

Our design approach centers on a vector prediction algorithm that enables the AHA! to predict the location of the puck and move its mallet to defend its goal or strike the puck back at the user. The puck is monitored via a camera mounted at a birds-eye-view of the air hockey table which feeds images to a microcontroller. The AHA! mallet is attached to a 3D printed and laser cut rail system driven by DC motors and uses encoders to establish an XY coordinate system on the table. Users can interact with the system through an LCD touch screen interface. Options are given to calibrate the system, choose a difficulty setting and start the game. During game play, the score is displayed for the user to see and the user also has the option to terminate the game prematurely.

Upon completion of the project, we foresee one area of advancement upon our system. This includes a user feedback module that monitors player movements and defense/offense play to report areas of improvement that the player can make. This would require a much longer time frame, but is a feature that consumers tend to expect from modern games.

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Team Ohm-bres

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 21:50:11 +0000

Team Ohm-bres Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 15:50

Instructors and students lose valuable class time erasing the whiteboard, reducing the effectiveness of lectures. Our project attempts to solve this problem with the Eraser-Bot. While lecturing or conducting class, a teacher can use the device to erase the whiteboard without diverting attention from the classroom. The device provides an automated method for erasing a whiteboard, which is not widely available in schools and universities at this time. The user can preserve parts of the board that he/she wants to save for later and can continue to lecture and write on the board while the Eraser-Bot handles erasing other areas.

The project consists of three main components: the Eraser-Bot, a camera module with an on- board processor, and an Android application. The Eraser-Bot is like a remote control car with an eraser strapped to its underside that can be raised or lowered. It magnetically attaches to the whiteboard navigating to portions of the board the user desires to have erased. The user uses the Android application to specify these regions. An image is sent to the Android device from the camera module, which is placed in front of the board conveniently attached to either the roof or a projector, via a Bluetooth connection. The user can then box the sections they desire to have erased. These coordinates are transmitted back to the camera module, the brain of the Eraser- Bot. The camera module handles the detection of writing and calculates Eraser-Bot movements, continually updating them to keep the eraser-bot on its intended course.

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