Computer Engineering Commons^™

Integrating Mathematics And Educational Robotics: Simple Motion Planning, Ronald I. Greenberg, George K. Thiruvathukal, Sara T. Greenberg

George K. Thiruvathukal

This paper shows how students can be guided to integrate elementary mathematical analyses with motion planning for typical educational robots. Rather than using calculus as in comprehensive works on motion planning, we show students can achieve interesting results using just simple linear regression tools and trigonometric analyses. Experiments with one robotics platform show that use of these tools can lead to passable navigation through dead reckoning even if students have limited experience with use of sensors, programming, and mathematics.

Should Robots Prosecute And Defend?, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Work In Progress: Teaching Game Design And Robotics Together: A Natural Marriage Of Computing And Engineering Design In A First-Year Engineering Course, Adam R. Carberry, Ashish Amresh

Ashish Amresh

The increased dependence on computer programming in engineering has made it essential for engineering students to learn about programming throughout their undergraduate education. In the same vein, computing students benefit when given an opportunity to learn more about engineering design and systematic thinking. This paper discusses how one college embedded computing and engineering into a combined first-year introductory course. The course fuses computing and engineering using game design and robotics as an offering for both cohorts of students to work together in a multidisciplinary environment. Over the course of the semester, students learn introductory computing and engineering design concepts by …

Pythagorean Combinations For Lego Robot Building., Ronald I. Greenberg

Ronald Greenberg

This paper provides tips for LEGO robot construction involving bracing or gear meshing along a diagonal using standard Botball kits.

Pythagorean Approximations For Lego: Merging Educational Robot Construction With Programming And Data Analysis, Ronald I. Greenberg

Ronald Greenberg

Abstract. This paper can be used in two ways. It can provide reference information for incorporating diagonal elements (for bracing or gear meshing) in educational robots built from standard LEGO kits. Alternatively, it can be used as the basis for an assignment for high school or college students to recreate this information; in the process, students will exercise skills in both computer programming and data analysis. Using the paper in the second way can be an excellent integrative experience to add to an existing course; for example, the Exploring Computer Science high school curriculum concludes with the units “Introduction to …

Motion Planning For Simple Two-Wheeled Robots, Ronald I. Greenberg, Jeffery M. Karp

Ronald Greenberg

This paper considers various simple ways of navigating in a 2-dimensianal territory with a two-wheeled robot of a type typical in educational robotics. We determine shortest paths under various modes of operation and compare.

Effects Of Anthropomorphism On Trust In Human-Robot Interaction, Keith R. Macarthur, William T. Shugars, Tracy L. Sanders, Peter A. Hancock

Keith Reid MacArthur

Swarm Engineering, S. Kazadi '90

Sanza Kazadi

Swarm engineering is the natural evolution of the use of swarm-based techniques in the accomplishment of high level tasks using a number of simple robots. In this approach, one seeks not to generate a class of behaviors designed to accomplish a given global goal, as is the approach typically found in mainstream robotics. Once the class of behaviors has been understood and decided upon, specific behaviors designed to accomplish this goal may be generated that will complete the desired task without any concern about whether or not the final goal will actually be completed. As long as the generated behaviors …

Perceptions Of Planned Versus Unplanned Malfunctions: A Human-Robot Interaction Scenario, Theresa T. Kessler, Keith R. Macarthur, Manuel Trujillo-Silva, Thomas Macgillivray, Chris Ripa, Peter A. Hancock

Keith Reid MacArthur

Human-Robot Interaction: Proximity And Speed—Slowly Back Away From The Robot!, Keith R. Macarthur, Kimberly Stowers, Peter A. Hancock

Keith Reid MacArthur

Human-Robot Versus Human-Human Relationship Impact On Comfort Levels Regarding In Home Privacy, Keith R. Macarthur, Thomas G. Macgillivray, Eva L. Parkhurst, Peter A. Hancock

Keith Reid MacArthur

Data And Network Optimization Effect On Web Performance, Steven Rosenberg, Surbhi Dangi, Isuru Warnakulasooriya

Surbhi Dangi

In this study, we measure the effects of two software approaches to improving data and network performance: 1. Content optimization and compression; and 2. Optimizing network protocols. We achieve content optimization and compression by means of BoostEdge by ActivNetworks and employ the SPDY network protocol by Google to lower the round trip time for HTTP transactions. Since the data and transport layers are separate, we conclude our investigation by studying the combined effect of these two techniques on web performance. Using document mean load time as the measure, we found that with and without packet loss, both BoostEdge and SPDY …

Autonomous Cars And Driverless Lethal Autonomy, Nyagudi Musandu Nyagudi

Nyagudi M Nyagudi

“The small picture” - make an advanced autonomous /driverless car. Lots of algorithms, sensors, computers and other gizmos. Now get it to take you to work, park itself and seamlessly run your family errands around the city. Taking grandma to the doctor for the medical check-up, getting the children from school, etc. With Radar, Lidar and other sensors, the car steering with ease through the traffic, no driver to pay, that is another plus, fuel/energy efficiency, yet another plus. It is a bold new world and the sky is the limit. Without the resolution of “small picture” issues there is …

Addressing Food Wastage By Tracking The Expiry Date, Shiva P. Bachu

Electronics Elements

We know trash is an enormous problem in the world since trash does not only affect just humans but it also affects living creatures in general. The biggest contributor of trash in the United States is food waste. Food waste is produced by every human and the amounts of food waste is astonishing. Americans throw away almost half of the food that they buy, which is almost worth $165 billion per year. Food waste which end up in landfills and incinerators produces methane which is a greenhouse gas and can contribute to global warming. Trash in general and food waste …

An Intelligent Attitude Determination And Control System Concept For A Cubesat Class Spacecraft, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

An attitude determination and control system (ADCS) is used to orient a spacecraft for a wide variety of purposes (e.g., to keep a camera facing Earth or orient the spacecraft for propulsion system use). The proposed intelligent ADCS has several key features: first, it can be used in multiple modes, spanning from passive stabilization of two axes and unconstrained spin on a third to three-axis full active stabilization. It also includes electromagnetic components to ‘dump’ spin from the reaction wheels. Second, the ADCS utilizes an incorporated autonomous control algorithm to characterize the effect of actuation of the system components and, …

Assessment Of The Stability Of A Four Legged Robot Manipulator, Dr. Awad Eisa G. Mohamed

Innovative Research Publications IRP India

This paper deals with static stability of a four legged robot manipulator when it moves with trot gait. In this paper, the stability analysis based on dynamics of walking usually proposed for the analysis of walking system studied and identified its limits and ambiguity. After identifying the key issues of stability, it has been identified that moment around the supporting diagonal line of quadruped in trotting gait largely influences walking stability. Therefore Moment around the supporting diagonal line of quadruped in trotting gait is modeled and its effects on body attitude (roll and pitch) are analyzed. The degree of influence …

An Onboard Distributed Multiprocessing System For A Cubesat Spacecraft Created From Gumstix Computer-On-Module Units, Michael Wegerson, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

The OpenOrbiter Small Spacecraft Development Initiative at the University of North Dakota [1] aims to make ac-cess to space for research and educational purposes easier by enabling the creation of low-cost CubeSats. It is creating the Open Prototype for Educational Nanosats (OPEN), a framework for developing a 1-U CubeSat space-craft with a parts cost of less than $5,000 [2]. The designs [3], documentation and computer code from this will be made publically available to enable the development of programs at other institutions.

The Use Of Low-Cost ‘Balloonsats’ For Stem Education With 3d Printing, Jeremy Straub, Josh Berk, John Nordlie, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

A new technology, known as 3D printing, allows the rap-id fabrication of plastic structures of virtually any config-uration. These structures are light-weight, dura-ble and inexpensive. This paper considers the utility of utilizing 3D printing to create enclosures for ‘BalloonSats’ – small, low-cost spacecraft analog which can be utilized by students to understand space engi-neering, conduct near-space science (e.g., physics, bio-logical and other experiments) and touch the edge of space.

Considering Scheduling Algorithms For An Open Source Software Spacecraft, Calvin Bina, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

The OpenOrbiter Small Satellite Development Initiative at the University of North Dakota [1] is working make space research and education more accessible world-wide [2], through the design and public release of a complete set of plans, software and other documents (see [3]) for a 1-U CubeSat. This design targets a parts cost of no more than $5,000 [4]. These lowered costs, combined with the efficiencies of the CubeSat form fac-tor [5] and free-to-qualified-developer launch services [6, 7] should facilitate greater access to space for the ed-ucational, research and other communities.

Designing An Intelligent Attitude Determination And Control System (Adcs), Michael Wegerson, Matt Partridge, Nathan Crocker, David Schindele, Broc Friend, Levi Lewis, Ben Johnson, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

CubeSat spacecraft have been shown to provide significant cost [1], research [1] and educational benefits [2]. Prior work at UND has demonstrated the efficacy of this form factor of craft for asteroid as-sessment activities [3] and onboard image processing [4]. Work is al-so ongoing to develop a low-cost framework [5] for CubeSat devel-opment to enable activities at UND and at other locations.

Update On The Progress Of The 1-U Open Cubesat Development, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

The OpenOrbiter program [1] is developing a low-cost framework for the creation of space-craft [2] by researchers and educators world-wide [3]. In line with the objective of enabling future educational use by others, educational assessment [4, 5] has been a key focus. Sever-al areas were assessed: students were asked what types of benefits they sought from their participation [6], assessment of benefit attain-ment is ongoing. Work on the development of a designs (See Figures 2 and 8) that can be used to build a spacecraft with a cost of under $5,000 [7] using primarily COTS parts and testing (see Figure …

Nanosatellite Scheduling Using A Dictionary Module And A ‘Useful Trick’ With Coded Unsigned Integers, Monilito Castro, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

Schedulers for small spacecraft must satisfy the dual requirement of generating very efficient schedules while concurrently minimizing the resources required to create the schedule. This paper proposes a technique for searching for tasks that can be utilized to fill particular schedule locations. This approach is based on a modular system for storing important variables. This modular system has three important variables: t0, x0 and y0. The variable y is latitude and x is longitude. Time variable t is an integer and each unit represents a time quantum. They are related to each other by three functions Ft, Fx, and Fy. …

Swarm Intelligence, A Blackboard Architecture And Local Decision Making For Spacecraft Command, Jeremy Straub

Jeremy Straub

Control of a multi-spacecraft constellation is a topic of significant inquiry, at present. This paper presents and evaluates a command architecture for a multi-spacecraft mission. It combines swarm techniques with a decentralized / local decision making architecture (which uses a set of shared blackboards for coordination) and demonstrates the efficacy of this approach. Under this approach, the Blackboard software architecture is used to facilitate data sharing between craft as part of a resilient hierarchy and the swarm techniques are used to coordinate activity. The paper begins with an overview of prior work on the precursor command technologies and then presents …

Driving In Traffic: Short-Range Sensing For Urban Collision Avoidance, Chuck Thorpe, David Duggins, Jay Gowdy, Rob Maclaughlin, Christoph Mertz, Mel Siegel, Arne Suppe, Bob Wang, Teruko Yata

Mel Siegel

Intelligent vehicles are beginning to appear on the market, but so far their sensing and warning functions only work on the open road. Functions such as runoff-road warning or adaptive cruise control are designed for the uncluttered environments of open highways. We are working on the much more difficult problem of sensing and driver interfaces for driving in urban areas. We need to sense cars and pedestrians and curbs and fire plugs and bicycles and lamp posts; we need to predict the paths of our own vehicle and of other moving objects; and we need to decide when to issue …

Sensor Fusion For Context Understanding, Huadong Wu, Mel Siegel, Sevim Ablay

Mel Siegel

To answer the challenge of context-understanding for HCI, we propose and test experimentally a top-down sensor fusion approach. We seek to systematize the sensing process in two steps: first, decompose relevant context information in such a way that it can be described in a model of discrete facts and quantitative measurements; second, we build a generalizable sensor fusion architecture to deal with highly distributed sensors in a dynamic configuration to collect, fuse and populate our context information model. This paper describes our information model, system architecture, and preliminary experimental results.

Benefits Estimation Of Sensor-Friendly Vehicle And Roadway Cooperative Safety Systems, James A. Misener, Chuck Thorpe, Robert Ferlis, Ron Hearne, Mel Siegel, Joe Perkowski

Mel Siegel

An analysis was performed to estimate the potential national costs and benefits of cooperative vehicle and roadway measures to enhance the effectiveness of driver assistance systems. These cooperative measures ?query-response communication system, light emitting diode brake light messaging, radar cross section paint striping modifications, fluorescent paint for lane and other marking applications, passive amplifiers on license plates, spatial tetrahedral arrays of reflectors, and in-vehicle corner cubes ?are briefly described, along with assumptions that were made regarding performance. For the example lane departure case, the incremental nationwide effectiveness over an autonomous collision avoidance system is estimated and monetized. This was generally …

Dependable Perception For Robots, Chuck Thorpe, Olivier Clatz, David Duggins, Jay Gowdy, Rob Maclachlan, J. Ryan Miller, Christoph Mertz, Mel Siegel, Chieh-Chih Wang, Teruko Yata

Mel Siegel

The weakest link in many mobile robots is perception. In order to build robots that are reliable and dependable and safe, we need to build robots that can see. Perception is becoming a solved problem for certain constrained environments. But for robots working outdoors, and at high speeds, and in close proximity to people, perception is still incomplete. Our robots need to see objects; to detect motion; and to detect which of those objects are people. In the current state of the art, this requires multiple sensors and multiple means of interpretation. This paper illustrates those principles in the context …

Tactile Sensing By The Sole Of The Foot Part Ii: Calibration And Real-Time Processing, Abhinav Kalamdani, Chris Messom, Mel Siegel

Mel Siegel

This paper introduces prototype experimental apparatus and the calibration and real-time signal processing required to investigate stability in standing, walking and running of humanoid robots using pressure sensing at the sole-of-the-foot contact. The system can provide very good spatial or temporal resolution and these can be traded off against each other dynamically to accommodate the instantaneous requirement, for example, sparsely sampling the whole sole during static balancing vs. densely sampling the impact region during walking or running. Dynamic variation in sampling policy during different phases of the gait is foreseen so as to optimise utilisation of the total sampling bandwidth …

The Use Of The Blackboard Architecture For A Decision Making System For The Control Of Craft With Various Actuator And Movement Capabilities, Jeremy Straub, Hassan Reza

Jeremy Straub

This paper provides an overview of an approach to the control of multiple craft with heterogeneous movement and actuation characteristics that is based on the Blackboard software architecture. An overview of the Blackboard architecture is provided. Then, the operational and mission requirements that dictate the need for autonomous control are characterized and the utility of the Blackboard architecture is for meeting these requirements is discussed. The performance of a best-path solver and naïve solver are compared. The results demonstrate that the best-path solver outperforms the naïve solver in the amount of time taken to generate a solution; however, the number …

Adaptive Sampling For Multi-Robot Wide-Area Exploration, Kian Hsiang Low, Geoffrey Gordon, John M. Dolan, Pradeep Khosla

Pradeep K Khosla

The exploration problem is a central issue in mobile robotics. A complete coverage is not practical if the environment is large with a few small hotspots, and the sampling cost is high. So, it is desirable to build robot teams that can coordinate to maximize sampling at these hotspots while minimizing resource costs, and consequently learn more accurately about properties of such environmental phenomena. An important issue in designing such teams is the exploration strategy. The contribution of this paper is in the evaluation of an adaptive exploration strategy called Adaptive Cluster Sampling (ACS), which is demonstrated to reduce the …