Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Pipe Conveyor System For Cylindrical Steel Pipe, Josiah Paynter, Hannah Harris, Sam Bowden, Nicolas Fuentes

Scholar Week 2016 - present

The Peddinghaus Pipe Conveyor Senior Engineering Design Team was given the task of equipping an existing conveyor system with the ability to convey cylindrical steel pipe down the system while keeping the pipe in line with the datum and passline planes and restricting axial rotation. A metal prototype was constructed out of 0.25” mild steel that can store safely underneath the existing conveyor when not in use and extend when needed to constrain the pipes. Three pneumatic cylinders to actuate the main arm of the prototype were equipped with a polyurethane-coated roller to hold the pipe against both the conveyor …

Kwad - Ksu All Weather Autonomous Drone, Nick Farinacci, Sebastian Gomez, Stewart Baker, Ed Sheridan

Symposium of Student Scholars

"KWAD" or "KSU all-Weather Autonomous Drone" project was sponsored by Ultool, LLC to the KSU Research and Service Foundation to create a lightweight drone capable of capturing HD video during all-weather operations. The conditions of all-weather operation include rainfall of one inch per hour and wind speeds of up to twenty miles per hour. In addition, a global minimum structural safety factor of two is required to ensure the system's integrity in extreme weather conditions. Potential mission profiles include autonomous aerial delivery, topological mapping in high moisture areas, security surveillance, search and rescue operations, emergency transportation of medical supplies, and …

Assistive Robotic Platform For Non‐Urgent Household Tasks: A New Design, Amanda Serger, Normandy Tanguilan, Hakki Erhan Sevil

36th Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

Humans overcome minor household inconveniences daily without fully recognizing how challenging these tasks could be for individuals such as elderly people or people with disabilities. Those people often times struggle to complete tasks, for instance opening a door or reaching for an item, leading them to rely on caregivers for help. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this caregiver support becomes an unsafe and unreliable solution that can result in a greater risk, thus the need for another solution arises: robotic technology. Recent developments in the robotics field have paved the way for this research, aiming to design a home assistance robot …

Gesture-Based American Sign Language (Asl) Translation System, Kayleigh Moore, Stefano Pecile, Mahdi Yazdanpour

Posters-at-the-Capitol

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 5% of the world's population experiences severe hearing loss. Approximately 9 million people in the U.S. are either functionally deaf or have mild-to-severe hearing loss. In this research, we designed and implemented a translation interface which turns American Sign Language (ASL) gestures captured from a pair of soft robotic gloves into text and speech instantaneously.

We used a combination of flex sensors, tactile sensors, and accelerometers to recognize hand gestures and to record hand and fingers positions, movements, and orientations. The digitized captured gestures were then sent to our proposed translation interface …

Unmanned Aerial System Design For Civil Engineering Operations – A Vip Study, Ezra Robles, Harrison Vicknair, Derek Price, Logan Westra, George Pitcock, Joshua Diamond, Bhuvan Saraswat, Jeremiah Prayor, Fon Saliki

Symposium of Student Scholars

Unmanned Aerial System Design for Civil Engineering Operations – A Case Study

The objective of the project is to design and build a modular Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) that meets the specifications set forth by United Consulting – a local civil engineering company. These specifications are achieved through three unique missions. In each mission, data is collected using different methods. These missions include land surveying, bridge structure inspection and manhole probing. The key requirements of the drone are to maintain a minimum flight time of 30 minutes and the ability to receive and transmit telemetry, photographic and video data from …

Autonomous Vehicle For Asphalt Laying, Gilberto Gonzalez

2022 MME Undergraduate Research Symposium

Autonomous vehicles are constantly being developed and are gaining recognition from many industries to improve workplace safety and efficiency. This project intends to weaken the barrier that prevents the usage of autonomous vehicles in the workplace. To move toward this objective, this project focuses on developing a computer vision system for an autonomous utility vehicle that lays asphalt. The goal of this project is to directly address the issue of the high number of potholes in our driving roads, which create a dangerous and hazardous environment for persons that utilize motorized and non-motorized vehicles on roads. The vehicle’s computer vision …

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 …

Development Of A Compliant Gripper Driven By 3 Dof Soft Robot, Derek M. Price Ii, Ricardo Ramirez, Pt Angel Tran

Symposium of Student Scholars

Industrial robots are moving toward automation, which makes it increasingly necessary to replace the functions traditionally performed by humans with robotics. Pick and place operation is a prime example of such automation. Robots that pick up and place objects mimic the human action of picking an object up and placing it in a targeted location. It has led to the development of robotic end-effectors that have a human-like feel. Grippers can be articulated in various ways depending on their application area and well-defined desired tasks. As compliant and soft links deflect more under the same load than their rigid body …

Olivet Robotics, Caroline Orndorff, Allann Davidson, Jared Haworth, Nicholas Mills

Scholar Week 2016 - present

The VEX Robotics Competition is a challenging event series for elementary to university students. Each year, VEX creates thought provoking games with goals that must be accomplished via robotics. The question ONU Robotics Team must answer is “how can one create the most effective strategies in order to win?” during the 2019-2020 Tower Takeover Game. The ONU Robotics Senior Design Team (ORSeT) will work to answer this question with principles from Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Science. ORSeT will use this opportunity to not only create a winning robot, but also to challenge team members’ creative abilities and engineering …

The Comparison Of Verbalized Feedback In Human To Computer Interfacing Versus Human To Human Interaction, Kea Francis

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

The project evaluates response to social robots for purposeful tasks. The study uses a social robot, Rapiro, along with a smartphone that serves as a visual interface for the robot system. My role was to design a program on a Raspberry Pi that allows simultaneous control of Rapiro’s actions and a response from a phone application. The phone app is downloaded to an Android phone and designed using MIT App Inventor software. This allows pre-programmed and real-time control of the robot. The user inputs what they want the robot to say through the terminal of the Raspberry Pi. Through serial …

Purdue Air Sense: A Methodology For Improving The Accuracy Of Ambient Aerosol Mass Concentration And Size Distribution Measurement With Low-Cost Optical Sensing Techniques, Rishabh Ramsisaria, Satya Sundar Patra, Brandon Emil Boor

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

There is a global lack of a means for monitoring air pollutant levels at a local level due to expensive and bulky instrument requirements. It is important to monitor toxic gas levels, as well as particulate matter levels, in the atmosphere to study their effects on human health and to further develop city- and community-level air pollution solutions. In this study, with the means of a Raspberry Pi, low-cost Alphasense Optical Particle Counter and gas sensors, and methodical calibration techniques, we built a portable 3-D printed module powered by clean electricity generated by an on-board Voltaic solar cell that measures …

Micro-Manipulation Using Learned Model, Matthew A. Lyng, Benjamin V. Johnson, David J. Cappelleri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Microscale devices can be found in applications ranging from sensors to structural components. The dominance of surface forces at the microscale hinders the assembly processes through nonlinear interactions that are difficult to model for automation, limiting designs of microsystems to primarily monolithic structures. Methods for modeling surface forces must be presented for viable manufacturing of devices consisting of multiple microparts. This paper proposes the implementation of supervised machine learning models to aid in automated micromanipulation tasks for advanced manufacturing applications. The developed models use sets of training data to implicitly model surface interactions and predict end-effector placement and paths that …

Measurement Of Speed Of Sound Profile Using Laaces Balloon, Zhuang Li, Brett Schaefer, Brian Schaefer, William Dever, Tyler Morgan, Matthew Foltz

2017 Academic High Altitude Conference

The goal of this mission is to test the speed of sound at different altitudes and ultimately at a maximum height of 100,000 feet (30 km). In conjunction with this testing, environmental parameters including temperature, pressure, and humidity are measured and used to calculate the speed of sound to compare to the measured results. The team constructed the payload “Dorothy” using polystyrene foam due to its lightweight and thermal isolation property. An ultrasonic sensor with a reflection mirror were installed outside payload box to measure speed of sound. All the sensors were calibrated. Software for the project was developed in …

Parallel Computation Using Mems Oscillator-Based Computing System, Xinrui Wang, Ilias Bilionis, Salar Safarkhani

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In recent years, parallel computing systems such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been of great interest. In these systems which emulate the behavior of human brains, the processing is carried out simultaneously. However, it is still a challenging engineering problem to design highly efficient hardware for parallel computing systems. We will study the properties of networks of Microelectromechanical System (MEMS) oscillators to explore their capabilities as parallel computing infrastructure. Furthermore, we simulate the time-variant states of MEMS oscillators network under various initial conditions and performance of certain tasks. Recent theoretical results show that networks of MEMS oscillators have some …

Ani-Bot: A Mixed-Reality Ready Modular Robotics System, Zhuangying Xu, Yuanzhi Cao

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

DIY modular robotics has always had a strong appeal to makers and designers; being able to quickly design, build, and animate their own robots opens the possibility of bringing imaginations to life. However, current interfaces to control and program the DIY robot either lacks connection and consistency between the users and target (Graphical User Interface) or suffers from limited control capabilities due to the lack of versatility and functionality (Tangible User interface). We present Ani-Bot, a modular robotics system that allows users to construct Do-It-Yourself (DIY) robots and use mixed-reality approach to interact with them instantly. Ani-Bot enables novel user …

Mechanical Design And Optimization Of An Interactive Animatronic Bald Eagle, Eric Burns

Phi Kappa Phi Research Symposium (2012-2016)

Animatronics is a specialized sub-category of mechatronics, a fusion of mechanical and electrical engineering. The field has grown from small, individual projects into a major industry. As animatronics progress, mechanical engineers are pushed to design internal structures which occupy ever-decreasing spaces and to ensure designs can undergo maintenance and modifications smoothly. This research investigates methods of reducing space required for mechanisms and several other beneficial methods of development as well as varying satisfactions for audiences when exposed to actor-controlled systems rather than pre-scripted functions. The mechanical systems are designed using CAD software available at Georgia Southern. On-campus, resources are used …

The Design Of A Racing Simulator: A Three-Phase User Testing Approach, Jakob E. Rouleau, Eric J. Wach

Human Factors and Applied Psychology Student Conference

No abstract provided.

Optimization In The Simulation Of Jammed Polyhedral Particles, Joseph W. Mynhier, Ishan Srivastava, Timothy S. Fisher

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Energy loss due to poor transport properties in electrically and thermally conducting materials, such as battery electrodes and thermoelectric composites, contributes to the energy inefficiency of electronic devices. For conductive materials composed of granular materials, particle-particle contact topology strongly governs the efficiency of energy transfer. Although there is a large body of existing work on the arrangements made by granular materials comprised of spherical particles, less is known about the mechanically stable arrangements of granular materials made of convex polyhedra. This project seeks to create a computer simulation of the solidification of convex polyhedra from a diffuse state into a …

Improved Microrobotic Control Through Image Processing And Automated Hardware Interfacing, Archit R. Aggarwal, Wuming Jing, David J. Cappelleri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Untethered submilliliter-sized robots (microrobots) are showing potential use in different industrial, manufacturing and medical applications. A particular type of these microrobots, magnetic robots, have shown improved performance in power and control capabilities compared to the other thermal and electrostatic based robots. However, the magnetic robot designs have not been assessed in a robust manner to understand the degree of control in different environments and their application feasibility. This research project seeks to develop a custom control software interface to provide a holistic tool for researchers to evaluate the microrobotic performance through advance control features. The software deliverable involved two main …

The Design Of A Mobile, Animatronic Bald Eagle, Eric Burns

Phi Kappa Phi Research Symposium (2012-2016)

Modern animatronics are used as a tool to help engage audiences in realistic and entertaining experiences. Many animatronic figures are dynamic in movement, but static in mobility. The research presented covers the beginnings of mobile animatronic research. An animatronic bald eagle, Opportunity, was designed for that purpose. Animations for Opportunity are generated by integration of Arduino, Pololu Mini Maestro, and Hitec Servo Motors. Arduino receives signals from flex sensors which cause voltage variations when “flexed”. The 1:1 scale, animatronic eagle can be perched on the arm of an “actor” who simulates an eagle’s caretaker. The flex sensors are located within …

Code Optimization For Phase Field Method, Sergio Andres Monsalve, Marisol Koslowski

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The Phase field model method for studying grain dislocation at atomic level after applying an external force to the materials being tested, enables simulate the behavior of different materials after applying stress. With the appropriate numerical method the simulation could change drastically the complexity of the algorithm. Finding the most accurate and stable numerical method for the phase field model give us a considerable improving in the performance of the code used to simulate the phase field dynamic dislocation in larger and more complex simulations can be performed. We made an statistic comparison between the different methods, comparing stability and …

2nd Annual Undergraduate Research Conference Abstract Book, University Of Missouri--Rolla

Undergraduate Research Conference at Missouri S&T

No abstract provided.