Hardware Systems Commons^™

Therapeutic Mechanical Horse, Cade M. Liberty, Aleya Dolorfino, Peter Philips, Zuzanna Dominik, Luke Watts

Mechanical Engineering

Jack's Helping Hand and its hippotherapy participants required a device to serve as an alternative to a live horseback riding experience that could also increase the range of riders. This would provide more clients with equine-assisted therapy that has proven to better the lives of people with both physical and mental disabilities. Horses can be unpredictable, tall, and sometimes anxiety-inducing, especially for new riders. Our group’s aim was to develop a mechanical horse that will be able to reduce these issues for equine therapy centers and the riders they help. When a rider gets to practice sitting on ...

Smartphone Control Of Rc Cars, Weston R. Fitzgerald

Electrical Engineering

The smartphone-controlled RC (remote-controlled) car is an inexpensive remote-controlled car designed to be fast and portable. Instead of manufacturing, packaging, and shipping a separate controller, the remote control is implemented in a phone application, which saves time and money in both the design process and the manufacturing process. Utilizing the user’s smartphone is more cost-effective since mobile devices are a common recurrence, and packaging fewer devices results in overall better portability of the product.

This smartphone-controlled car is speedy and intuitive to learn for typical smartphone users. The user can change the car’s speed and direction wirelessly using ...

Barrier Knockdown Test Control System For The Cal Poly Kinesiology Department, Regina M. Chapuis

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to design and implement a new control system for the LEDs and buttons on an existing Barrier Knockdown setup in the Cal Poly Kinesiology department. The Barrier Knockdown test is a testing apparatus in which subjects knock down a series of mechanical barriers in one of three patterns. The computer system times their reaction and movement time, and the test as a whole provides students with data to study the phenomenon of Contextual Interference. This system was previously controlled by an old computer setup that ultimately crashed. This project recreates the logic and user ...

Side-Channel Analysis On Post-Quantum Cryptography Algorithms, Tristen Teague

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The advancements of quantum computers brings us closer to the threat of our current asymmetric cryptography algorithms being broken by Shor's Algorithm. NIST proposed a standardization effort in creating a new class of asymmetric cryptography named Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). These new algorithms will be resistant against both classical computers and sufficiently powerful quantum computers. Although the new algorithms seem mathematically secure, they can possibly be broken by a class of attacks known as side-channels attacks (SCA). Side-channel attacks involve exploiting the hardware that the algorithm runs on to figure out secret values that could break the security of the ...

Autonomous Navigator Mobile Robot Upgrade, David Sansoucy

Thinking Matters Symposium

The mobile robot platform has been developed over the course of 10 years at USM. In Spring 2020, Belle-Isle and Werner updated the previous framework by rewriting the software to use the ROS framework running on an on-board Raspberry Pi 3. They also implemented navigation using an A* motion planning algorithm and image processing. In Summer 2021, Ames incorporated Lidar and Kinect sensors onto the robot to improve its real-time navigation capabilities. He also made improvements to the power distribution systems. This project aimed to build on the ROS frameworks developed by the previous 2 teams with the main goal ...

Unconventional Computation Including Quantum Computation, Bruce J. Maclennan

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- EECS

Unconventional computation (or non-standard computation) refers to the use of non-traditional technologies and computing paradigms. As we approach the limits of Moore’s Law, progress in computation will depend on going beyond binary electronics and on exploring new paradigms and technologies for information processing and control. This book surveys some topics relevant to unconventional computation, including the definition of unconventional computations, the physics of computation, quantum computation, DNA and molecular computation, and analog computation. This book is the content of a course taught at UTK.

Cognality Vr: Exploring A Mobile Vr App With Multiple Stakeholders To Reduce Meltdowns In Autistic Children, Louanne E. Boyd, Espen Garner, Ian Kim, Gianna Valencia

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Many autistic children can have difficulty communicating, understanding others, and interacting with new and unfamiliar environments. At times they may suffer from a meltdown. The major contributing factor to meltdowns is sensory overwhelm. Technological solutions have shown promise in improving the quality of life for autistic children-however little exists to manage meltdowns. In this work with stakeholders, we design and deploy a low cost, mobile VR application to provide relief during sensory discomfort. Through the analysis of surveys from 88 stakeholders from a variety of groups (i.e., autistic adults, children with autism, parents of autistic individuals, and medical practitioners ...

A Low-Cost, Arduino-Based Platform For Emulating Energy Harvesting In Wireless Sensor Networks, Braden A. Miller

ONU Student Research Colloquium

This paper presents an Arduino-based platform for emulating energy harvesting in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) as a form of hardware-in-the-loop simulation. The platform makes use of a battery monitoring circuit and code implemented on the Arduino as an alternative to using significantly more expensive fully equipped energy harvesting nodes. Using embedded code to emulate the energy harvesting process allows for various energy harvesting models and processes to be tested using the same platform. The main contributions of this paper are the experimental data and analyses demonstrating the energy use characterization of the Arduino-based platform in a three-node relay network using ...

Real-Time Illumination Capture And Rendering On Mobile Devices, Snehal Padhye, James A. Ferwerda

Frameless

We present our efforts to develop methods for rendering 3D objects on mobile devices using real-world dynamic illumination from the user’s environment. To achieve this, we use the front and back cameras on the mobile device to estimate the light distribution in the environment in real time. We then create a dynamic illumination map and render the object at interactive rates in a browser on the device using a web-based graphics API. This project achieves one of the goals of our related work on realistic visualization of virtual objects: to make virtual objects appear to be situated within the ...

Mixed Reality Prototype Device Showcase: Using Smart Glasses To Enhance Language Access, Aaron Parker, Connor Switenky, Roshan Mathew, Wendy Dannels

Frameless

While the use of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters and real-time captioning significantly increases deaf individuals’ ability to participate in a wide variety of functions, there are some limitations. The major problem is that current ways of providing communication and information access to deaf people require them to split their attention between the visual focus of the specific content and the interpreter/captioning display. At any given point in time, deaf people are forced to decide what explanation to miss with subsequent effects on topic comprehension and perceptions of the interaction and environments.

Warehouse And Logistics: Smart Picking With Vuzix Smart Glasses, Elise Hemink

Frameless

Vuzix is an industry leader in augmented reality (AR) technology. We provide innovative products to an array of industries, a few being defense, security, enterprise, and consumers. Our AR technology provides a perfect balance of engagement in the digital and real worlds thanks to their innovative optics, AI apps and 5G capability.

Evaluating The Use Of Boot Image Encryption On Talos Ii Architecture, Calvin M. Muramoto

Theses and Dissertations

Sensitive devices operating in unprotected environments are vulnerable to hardware attacks like reverse engineering and side channel analysis. This represents a security concern because the root of trust can be invalidated through boot firmware manipulation. For example, boot data is rarely encrypted and typically travels across an accessible bus like the LPC bus, allowing data to be easily intercepted and possibly manipulated during system startup. The ash chip storing the boot data can also be removed from these devices and examined to reveal detailed boot information. This paper details an implementation of encrypting a section of the boot image and ...

Securing Infiniband Networks With End-Point Encryption, Noah B. Diamond

Theses and Dissertations

The NVIDIA-Mellanox Bluefield-2 is a 100 Gbps high-performance network interface which offers hardware offload and acceleration features that can operate directly on network traffic without routine involvement from the ARM CPU. This allows the ARM multi-core CPU to orchestrate the hardware to perform operations on both Ethernet and RDMA traffic at high rates rather than processing all the traffic directly. A testbed called TNAP was created for performance testing and a MiTM verification process called MiTMVMP is used to ensure proper network configuration. The hardware accelerators of the Bluefield-2 support a throughput of nearly 86 Gbps when using IPsec to ...

Design Project: 3d Printer/Injection Molder Hybrid, Lee Paolucci, Luke Everhart, Brandon Leap, Karson Lorey

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In the realm of rapid, small-scale prototyping, there are a few main factors that drive decisions to invest resources in technology to make that prototyping possible. Cost and ease of use are two of the most influential when looking at most SMEs (Small to Medium-sized Enterprises). The U.S. Small Business Administration defines an SME as smaller than 1,250 employees. According to An Assessment of Implementation of Entry-Level 3D Printers from the Perspective of Small Businesses, 59% of small manufacturers had implemented 3D printers as of 2014. However, no matter what technology is used in rapid prototyping, there are ...

Garden Bot: Autonomous Home Garden Weed Removal Robot, Brendon Lovejoy, Robert Connolly, Isaac Lucas, Stevan Veselinov

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

With frequent weeding being a tedious chore and an essential task for a successful garden, there is need for an automated method of handling this routine. Existing technologies utilize computer vision, GPS, multiple units and other tools to remove weeds from garden plots. However, these solutions are often complex and expensive, suited for large agricultural plots in contrast to small-scale home gardens. In addition, many of these technologies, along with manual tillers and cultivators suited for home use, are unable to perform weeding within rows of crops in a process known as intra-row weeding. The Garden Bot is an autonomous ...

Smart Bike Aftermarket System (Sbams), Noah Lamadanie, Jack Bullock, Dawson Beachy, John Albrecht

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Smart Bike Aftermarket System will be a set of connected modules, which, when installed on a standard bicycle, will allow it to mimic some of the safety and quality-of-life functionalities of an E-bike. The most notable of these safety features is an ability to detect vehicles approaching from behind and alert the user of potential collisions. The system will also implement lighting (Headlights, taillights, and turn signals), and a coupled application so a user can view more advanced information about their cycling. The primary advantage of this system over a standard E-bike is that it will have a lower ...

Comparative Analysis Of Rgb-Based Eye-Tracking For Large-Scale Human-Machine Applications, Brett Thaman, Trung Cao

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Gaze tracking has become an established technology that enables using an individual’s gaze as an input signal to support a variety of applications in the context of Human-Computer Interaction. Gaze tracking primarily relies on sensing devices such as infrared (IR) cameras. Nevertheless, in the recent years, several attempts have been realized at detecting gaze by acquiring and processing images acquired from standard RGB cameras. Nowadays, there are only a few publicly available open-source libraries and they have not been tested extensively. In this paper, we present the result of a comparative analysis that studied a commercial eye-tracking device using ...

Enhanced Security Utilizing Side Channel Data Analysis, Michael Taylor

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

The physical state of a system is affected by the activities and processes in which it is tasked with carrying out. In the past there have been many instances where such physical changes have been exploited by bad actors in order to gain insight into the operational state and even the data being held on a system. This method of side channel exploitation is very often effective due to the relative difficulty of obfuscating activity on a physical level. However, in order to take advantage of side channel data streams one must have a detailed working knowledge of how a ...

Autonomous Control And Signal Acquisition System, Rion Cadell Krampe

Honors College Theses

Our goal is to continue a previous teams project to build a NDE autonomous control and signal acquisition system that is more precise, more customizable with both code and mechanical parts, and cheaper than a similar system bought by the school. This goal has two stages to it. First, to repair the system from considerable damage it received during transportation. Secondly, to continue designing and developing the system to make considerable progress towards the goal of a fully functional NDE system. Along with making progress we must consider the team after us and create an easy stepping off point for ...

Design, Development, And Testing Of Embedded Computing On Afit's Control & Autonomy Space Proximity Robot (Caspr), Collin A. Gwaltney

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reviews RPO algorithm testbeds and discusses the development of the Control and Autonomy Space proximity Robot (CASpR) kinematic testbed housed at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT). CASpR operates on a rail system to propagate the trajectories of two satellites using the Hill-Clohessy-Wiltshire (HCW) Equations of Motion (EOMs). In this study, the implementation of a Jetson TX2i as an onboard flight computer is discussed and accomplished. Each hardware component used in the process of adding embedded computing as well as the software and paths of communication are all discussed in detail. Tests are conducted to assess the ...