Engineering Commons^™

Exploring Trade-Offs In Auv Controller Design For Shark Tracking, Louis James Bertsch Iv

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the use of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) to track and pursue a tagged shark through the water. A controller was designed to take bearing and range to the shark tag and then control the AUV to pursue it.

First, the ability of a particle filter to provide an accurate estimation of the location of the shark relative to the AUV is explored. Second, the ability of the AUV to follow the shark's path through the water is shown. This ability allows for localized environmental sampling of the shark's preferred path. Third, various path weightings are used …

The State Of Software Engineering Maturity And Licensure, Travis Lawrence Dean

Master's Theses

IEEE-CS is pursuing licensing for software engineers, but ACM believes that software engineering is too immature, and regulating the profession would be premature. In 1996, Norman Gibbs and Gary Ford from Carnegie Mellon University performed a qualitative survey of the maturity of the software engineering profession. I apply this model to the present state of the art in software engineering and analyze the results for 2010. I analyze the maturity of software engineering to determine that the profession is not yet ready for licensure. This is not because the infrastructure of software engineering is too immature, but because we have …

Universal Engineering Programmer – An In-House Development Tool For Developing And Testing Implantable Medical Devices In St. Jude Medical, Khoa Tat Do

Master's Theses

During development and testing of the functionality of the pacemaker and defibrillator device, engineers in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division use an in-house development tool called Universal Engineering Programmer (UEP) to ensure the device functions as expected, before it can be used to test on an animal or a human during the implantation process. In addition, some applications of UEP are incorporated into the official releases of the device product. UEP has been developed and used by engineers across departments in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division (CRMD). This thesis covers the flexible and reusable …

Freeing Space For Nasa: Incorporating A Lossless Compression Algorithm Into Nasa's Fiber Optic Strain Sensing System, Kaitlyn Fiechtner, Allen Parker

STAR Program Research Presentations

NASA’s Fiber Optic Strain Sensing (FOSS) system can gather and store up to 1,536,000 bytes (1.46 megabytes) per second. Since the FOSS system typically acquires hours—or even days—of data, the system can gather hundreds of gigabytes of data for a given test event. To store such large quantities of data more effectively, NASA is modifying a Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) lossless data compression program to compress data as it is being acquired in real time. After proving that the algorithm is capable of compressing the data from the FOSS system, the LZO program will be modified and incorporated into the FOSS system. …