Computer Engineering Commons^™

Flarebot - Analysis Of An Autonomous Robot, Sanat S. Sahasrabudhe

Computer Engineering

Autonomous robots are increasing in popularity for educational, research, and household purposes. This report analyzes the design and functionality of one such example, called FlareBot, which is designed to self-navigate and stack cans. Specifically, the robot is designed to follow a fixed path for navigation, and stack any cans it comes across. Once a maximum number of cans is stacked, the robot releases them and restarts the process. The design is achieved using three DC motors, two servo motors, one line sensor, and one infrared sensor. Designing autonomous robots is a strong test of the engineering design process, which includes …

Automatic Site Reconstruction With A Mobile Robot And Scanning Laser Proximity Sensor, Erik Nelson, Sean Willis, Nathan Lucero

Computer Engineering

Leading research in robotics, especially in the areas of computer vision, planning, and probabilistic learning, require a mobile robot platform to program. The design and construction of such a platform is a laborious task, calling upon knowledge from many branches of engineering. Additionally, hot research topics in robotics such as vision-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), advanced trajectory planning algorithms, and adaptive control for collision avoidance contain algorithms that build upon a localization and mapping architecture which is time-consuming to program in itself. To bring future senior project teams from Cal Poly's computer engineering and computer science departments closer to …

Practical Irrigation Scheduling Program, Dominic Sween

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

This senior project discusses the design, construction, and evaluation of an irrigation scheduling program that aids users in alfalfa irrigation management, with the potential for application with other crops. The program uses a very accurate irrigation prediction model that forecasts what the estimated irrigation need of each week will be, as well as the number of irrigations needed to satisfy the requirement. The model was found to predict the sum of the actual required weekly irrigation amount within less than 1% of the true value. The program was based off the single crop coefficient approach that was outlined previously by …

Path Loss In An Urban Peer-To-Peer Channel For Six Public-Safety Frequency Bands, David W. Matolak, Qian Zhang, Qiong Wu

Faculty Publications

We provide path loss data and models for a peer-to-peer wireless channel for an urban environment in six public safety bands, for simultaneous transmission to five spatially separated receiving sites. Results are from measurements in Denver, Colorado. The six frequencies at which we measured are (in MHz) 430, 750, 905, 1834, 2400, and 4860. Both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions were covered, and we quantify path loss exponents and linear-fit standard deviations as functions of frequency and location. Line-of-sight results agree with prior work, but non-line-of-sight exponents, from 3.6-7.3, are generally larger than in most other references.

Paris: A Parallel Rsa-Prime Inspection Tool, Joseph R. White

Master's Theses

Modern-day computer security relies heavily on cryptography as a means to protect the data that we have become increasingly reliant on. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, methods of security must be better than ever. Validation tools can be leveraged to help increase our confidence and accountability for methods we employ to secure our systems.

Security validation, however, can be difficult and time-consuming. As our computational ability increases, calculations that were once considered “hard” due to length of computation, can now be done in minutes. We are constantly increasing the size of our keys and attempting to make computations harder …

Accurate Hardware Raid Simulator, Darrin Kalung Weng

Master's Theses

Computer data storage is growing at an astonishing rate. With cloud computing and the growth of the Internet enterprise storage has been predicted to grow at rates as high as 300\% per year. To fulfill this need technologies such as Redundant Array of Independent Disks or RAID are being used in industry today. Not only does RAID increase I/O performance but also provides redundancy measures to protect against hardware failure. Even though RAID has existed for some time now and is well understood, proprietary optimizations such as command scheduling and cache strategies that are employed by current RAID controllers are …

Cuda Enhanced Filtering In A Pipelined Video Processing Framework, Austin Aaron Dworaczyk Wiltshire

Master's Theses

The processing of digital video has long been a significant computational task for modern x86 processors. With every video frame composed of one to three planes, each consisting of a two-dimensional array of pixel data, and a video clip comprising of thousands of such frames, the sheer volume of data is significant. With the introduction of new high definition video formats such as 4K or stereoscopic 3D, the volume of uncompressed frame data is growing ever larger.

Modern CPUs offer performance enhancements for processing digital video through SIMD instructions such as SSE2 or AVX. However, even with these instruction sets, …

Distributed Multichannel Speech Enhancement Based On Perceptually-Motivated Bayesian Estimators Of The Spectral Amplitude, Marek B. Trawicki, Michael T. Johnson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

In this study, the authors propose multichannel weighted Euclidean (WE) and weighted cosh (WCOSH) cost function estimators for speech enhancement in the distributed microphone scenario. The goal of the work is to illustrate the advantages of utilising additional microphones and modified cost functions for improving signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and segmental SNR (SSNR) along with log-likelihood ratio (LLR) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) objective metrics over the corresponding single-channel baseline estimators. As with their single-channel counterparts, the perceptually-motivated multichannel WE and WCOSH estimators are functions of a weighting law parameter, which influences attention of the noisy spectral amplitude through …

Growing Grounds Inventory Application, Courtney Schenkl

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Bruno The Robotic Bear, Aaron Brauner, Ian Panzer

Computer Engineering

Creating homemade robots are becoming a popular hobby among engineers. With the dramatic reduction in costs over the past few decades, it is finally possible to build a personal automated mailbox. Microcontrollers needed to function as the brains of the robot are also becoming powerful enough that relatively complicated instructions could be programmed into the robot to handle a plethora of sensors and peripherals. In order to demonstrate how the Computer Engineering department models the synthesis of computer science and electrical engineering, the topic chosen was robotics, specifically, a stuffed bear robot.

The microcontroller chosen was the Arduino Mega 2560 …

Modeling A Sensor To Improve Its Efficacy, Nabin K. Malakar, Daniil Gladkov, Kevin H. Knuth

Physics Faculty Scholarship

Robots rely on sensors to provide them with information about their surroundings. However, high-quality sensors can be extremely expensive and cost-prohibitive. Thus many robotic systems must make due with lower-quality sensors. Here we demonstrate via a case study how modeling a sensor can improve its efficacy when employed within a Bayesian inferential framework. As a test bed we employ a robotic arm that is designed to autonomously take its own measurements using an inexpensive LEGO light sensor to estimate the position and radius of a white circle on a black field. The light sensor integrates the light arriving from a …

Dynamic Poverty Heat Map, Jonathan Ahumada, Kurt Jurgens, Jasmine Farias

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Data management and analysis can become an overwhelming task when having to deal with large amounts of data. Fundación Paraguaya (FP), an organization that aims at reducing poverty in Paraguay, currently has been facing this data readability issue. The data from electronic surveys conducted by FP to measure poverty levels in different areas of Paraguay are currently presented in a complex and overwhelming manner via Excel spreadsheet. This method of data representation increases the risk of committing errors, as well as slows down the process of efficiently locating the areas of greatest needs and allocating the resources to these areas. …

Designing A Low Cost Prosthetic Arm Device, Samira Rezaei, Frank Fields, Tamara J. Depue

Student Research Symposium

The goal of the project is to build a functional low-cost prosthetic arm that is easily maintained. The focus is on prostheses that attach to the forearm. This design must perform daily life tasks such as picking up, holding and carrying objects while playing and working. To begin the design, a mechanical finger was built with wooden tongue depressors as bone material; rubber bands, string, and drinking straws as muscle material; and masking tape as ligament and tendon material. The length of each joint was set to the golden ratio. Using this method, a basic "hand" was created that could …

Performance Verification For Behavior-Based Robot Missions, Damian M. Lyons, Ronald Arkin, Shu Jiang, Tsung-Ming Liu, Paramesh Nirmal, J. Deeb

Faculty Publications

Certain robot missions need to perform predictably in a physical en-vironment that may only be poorly characterized in advance. This requirement raises many issues for existing approaches to software verification. An approach based on behavior-based controllers in a process-algebra framework is proposed by Lyons et al [15] to side-step state combinatorics. In this paper we show that this approach can be used to generate a Dynamic Bayesian Network for the problem, and that verification is reduced to a filtering problem for this network. We present validation results for the verification of a multiple waypoint robot mission using this approach.

What’S The Big Deal With Big Data?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Big Data does not necessarily cost big bucks, and smaller companies can benefit from it too. There are companies - branded consumer companies - which have developed technologies to scan the broad variety of data sources. What they’re doing is testing the success and popularity of their own products by seeing how often they crop up.

Rank Based Anomaly Detection Algorithms, Huaming Huang

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Dissertations

Anomaly or outlier detection problems are of considerable importance, arising frequently in diverse real-world applications such as finance and cyber-security. Several algorithms have been formulated for such problems, usually based on formulating a problem-dependent heuristic or distance metric. This dissertation proposes anomaly detection algorithms that exploit the notion of ``rank," expressing relative outlierness of different points in the relevant space, and exploiting asymmetry in nearest neighbor relations between points: a data point is ``more anomalous" if it is not the nearest neighbor of its nearest neighbors. Although rank is computed using distance, it is a more robust and higher level …

Robotic Kinect Bear, Spencer Lines, Dennis Waldron, Sagiv Sheelo

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project was to create an interactive 53”-tall robotic teddy bear to showcase various aspects of Cal Poly’s computer engineering degree. The interactive element took the form of a Microsoft Kinect for Windows sensor, which provided body and face position tracking of the user. Using this sensor and various other elements, we successfully made a teddy bear which mirrors a user's face and arm positions in real-time.

Designing Asynchronous Online Discussion Environments: Recent Progress And Possible Future Directions, Fei Gao, Tianyi Zhang, Teresa Franklin

Visual Communications and Technology Education Faculty Publications

Asynchronous online discussion environments are important platforms to support learning. Research suggests, however, threaded forums, one of the most popular asynchronous discussion environments, do not often foster productive online discussions naturally. This paper explores how certain properties of threaded forums have affected or constrained the quality of discussions, and argues that developing alternative discussion environments is highly needed to offer better support for asynchronous online communication. Using the Productive Discussion Model developed by Gao, Wang & Sun (2009), we analyzed current work on four types of asynchronous discussion environments that have been developed and researched: constrained environments, visualized environments, anchored …

Soft Skills And Software Development: A Reflection From The Software Industry, Faheem Ahmed, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Salah Bouktif, Piers Campbell

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Psychological theories assert that not everybody is fit for every task, as people have different personality traits and abilities. Often, personality traits are expressed in people’s soft skills. That is, the way people perceive, plan and execute any assigned task is influenced by their set of soft skills. Most of the studies carried out on the human factor in IS concentrate primarily on personality types. Soft skills have been given comparatively little attention by researchers. We review the literature relating to soft skills and the software engineering and information systems domain before describing a study based on 650 job advertisements …

A Performance Analysis Of Ws-* (Soap) And Restful Web Services For Implementing Service And Resource Orientated Architectures, Philip Markey, Gary Clynch

Conference Papers

The past number of years have seen the emergence of Service-Oriented Architectures as a dominant architecture for implementing enterprise scale distributed systems. Two main styles of SOA exist, namely SOAP based services and RESTful services. There has been much comment and debate on the pros and cons of each approach to implementing a SOA, a lot of which has surrounded the performance characterictcs of both approaches. In this paper, the authors presents the results of a performance analysis that was conducted on a set of test SOA scenarios implemented using both SOAP and RESTful approaches; in particular the caching capabilities …