Controls and Control Theory Commons^™

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 ...

Developing A Miniature Smart Boat For Marine Research, Michael Isaac Eirinberg

Computer Engineering

This project examines the development of a smart boat which could serve as a possible marine research apparatus. The smart boat consists of a miniature vessel containing a low-cost microcontroller to live stream a camera feed, GPS telemetry, and compass data through its own WiFi access point. The smart boat also has the potential for autonomous navigation. My project captivated the interest of several members of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo’s (Cal Poly SLO) Marine Science Department faculty, who proposed a variety of fascinating and valuable smart boat applications.

Closed-Loop Brain-Computer Interfaces For Memory Restoration Using Deep Brain Stimulation, David Xiaoliang Wang

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid growth of therapeutic brain-computer interfaces (BCI) targeting a diversity of brain dysfunctions. Among many neurosurgical procedures, deep brain stimulation (DBS) with neuromodulation technique has emerged as a fruitful treatment for neurodegenerative disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, post-traumatic amnesia, and Alzheimer's disease, as well as neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia. In parallel to the open-loop neuromodulation strategies for neuromotor disorders, recent investigations have demonstrated the superior performance of closed-loop neuromodulation systems for memory-relevant disorders due to the more sophisticated underlying brain circuitry during cognitive processes. Our ...

Manual Material Handling Lift-Assist System For Occupational Exoskeleton, Erik Goes, Daniel Guthrie, Trevor Ward

Honors Capstones

It is no secret that lifting heavy objects is one of the premier causes of workplace injury, and the modern worker needs help to remain healthy. Workers need something they always have with them that makes their work safer as well as easier; our solution is an active lift-assist exoskeleton. The proposed exoskeleton design includes a military backpack exoskeleton frame, on which two actuators pull cables attached to end effectors that the operator will be holding. This system can adjust to conform to a wide variety of operator sizes, without restricting any of their range of motion. This leads to ...

Environmental Exploration With Long, Thin Tendril Robots, Or Building Plant Based Robots And Teaching Them How To Feel, Michael Benjamin Wooten

All Dissertations

Continuum robots offer unique potential benefits for environmental exploration, notably in using their maneuverability to navigate congested environments. In this dissertation, we show how circumnutation, a motion strategy, commonly employed by plants, can be implemented, and usefully exploited, with continuum robots. We discuss how the kinematics of circumnutation, which combines local backbone growth with periodic backbone bending, can be created using extensible continuum robot hardware. The underlying kinematics are generated by adapting kinematic models of plant growth. We illustrate the effectiveness of that approach with experimental results with a tendril robot exploring a congested environment. However, significant challenges remain in ...

Control, Decision-Making, And Learning Approaches For Connected And Autonomous Driving Systems With Humans-In-The-Loop, Fangjian Li

All Dissertations

By virtue of vehicular connectivity and automation, the vehicle becomes increasingly intelligent and self-driving capable. However, no matter what automation level the vehicle can achieve, humans will still be in the loop despite their roles. First, considering the manual driving car as a disturbance to the connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), a novel string stability is proposed for mixed traffic platoons consisting of both autonomous and manual driving cars to guarantee acceptable motion fluctuation and platoon safety. Furthermore, humans are naturally considered as the rider in the passenger vehicle. A human-centered cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is designed to improve ...

Pulse-Coupled Oscillator Networks: Achieving Phase Continuity And Learning Optimal Control In Physical Systems, Timothy Anglea

All Dissertations

In this dissertation, we consider the application of pulse-coupled oscillator theory to real-world, physical networks. When the phase of an oscillator is associated with a physical measure, such as clock timing or robotic heading, discontinuous adjustments of the oscillator's phase is undesirable and potentially disadvantageous. Rather, continuous adjustment of the oscillator phase value is needed over a certain amount of time. To ensure that both synchronization and desynchronization can still be achieved under the constraint of continuous phase value changes, we pursue a novel approach to analyze the generalization of a pulse-coupled oscillator network with a time-varying coupling strength ...

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 ...

Ai Based Optimization Of Odometry Performance On Mobile Robots, Sunny Leveson Jones, Charles Koduru

Symposium of Student Scholars

Robots have become a large part of the modern world and have been used to navigate through complex environments, with various optimal speeds and pathing requirements. To improve this, we have developed an AI-based predictive pathing optimizer that takes in data regarding the requested route and implements optimal speeds. The algorithm will compare time lost to the time gained by moving at a higher velocity. This has been developed by implementing continual circular patterns onto a mobile robot, which allows for rapid analysis of both the accuracy and the speed of the cycle. This optimization is proposed to increase the ...

Model Predictive Control Of Energy Systems For Heat And Power Applications, Chethan Ramakrishna Reddy

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Building and transportation sectors together account for two-thirds of the total energy consumption in the US. There is a need to make these energy systems (i.e., buildings and vehicles) more energy efficient. One way to make grid-connected buildings more energy efficient is to integrate the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system of the building with a micro-scale concentrated solar power (MicroCSP) sys- tem. Additionally, one way to make vehicles driven by internal combustion engine (ICE) more energy efficient is by integrating the ICE with a waste heat recovery (WHR) system. But, both the resulting energy systems need a ...

Autonomous Coffee Brewing System, Lillian Gonzalez, Landon Miller, Tyler Moff, Benjamin Vitu

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Coffee consumers want an affordable, high-quality cup of coffee that takes minimal time to brew and does not excessively contribute plastic to landfills. A fully autonomous system which utilizes whole coffee beans, water, and filters to brew coffee was designed to meet this need. This system accepts user requests which specify the brew’s portion size, water temperature, and brew strength, as well as the time which the system should begin the brewing process. Occasional maintenance to empty the system’s built-in waste receptacle or resupply the system with water, coffee beans, or filters is the only user intervention required ...

Modeling Human Control Behavior In Command-Following Tasks, Sajad Koushkbaghi

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Humans interact with a variety of complex dynamic systems on a daily basis. However, they are often the lesser understood component of human-in-the-loop (HITL) systems. In this dissertation, we present the results of two HITL experiments to investigate the control strategies that humans use when performing command-following tasks. The first experiment is designed to investigate the control strategies that humans use to interact with nonlinear dynamic systems. Two groups of human subjects interact with a dynamic system and perform a command-following task. One group interacts with a linear time-invariant (LTI) dynamic system and the other group interacts with a Wiener ...

Performance Of Sensor Fusion For Vehicular Applications, Nikola Janevski

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Sensor fusion is a key system in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, ADAS. The perfor-
mance of the sensor fusion depends on many factors such as the sensors used, the kinematic
model used in the Extended Kalman Filter, EKF, the motion of the vehicles, the type of
road, the density of vehicles, and the gating methods. The interactions between parameters
and the extent to which individual parameters contribute to the overall accuracy of a sensor
fusion system can be difficult to assess.
In this study, a full-factorial experimental evaluation of a sensor fusion system based
on a real vehicle was performed ...

Magic: The Gathering Card Virtualizer, Vincent Garbonick, Jacen C. Conlan, Jaret A. Varn

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Any well-versed Magic: The Gathering (MTG) player or collector knows how difficult it can be to keep track of all cards in their collection. Some spend hours searching for that one specific card, and others are constantly scouring the internet for how much their collection costs. However, this issue does not only affect casual fans. Resale companies spend hours a day determining the costs of cards, and tournament judges painstakingly check players’ decks to ensure they are not cheating. To assist with these struggles, the design team proposed to create the MTG Card Virtualizer. This device scans MTG playing cards ...

Torque Vectoring To Maximize Straight-Line Efficiency In An All-Electric Vehicle With Independent Rear Motor Control, William Blake Brown

Theses and Dissertations

BEVs are a critical pathway towards achieving energy independence and meeting greenhouse and pollutant gas reduction goals in the current and future transportation sector [1]. Automotive manufacturers are increasingly investing in the refinement of electric vehicles as they are becoming an increasingly popular response to the global need for reduced transportation emissions. Therefore, there is a desire to extract the most fuel economy from a vehicle as possible. Some areas that manufacturers spend much effort on include minimizing the vehicle’s mass, body drag coefficient, and drag within the powertrain. When these values are defined or unchangeable, interest is driven ...

Modeling And Control Of A 7-Level Switched Capacitor Rectifier For Wireless Power Transfer Systems, Spencer Cochran

Doctoral Dissertations

Wireless power continues to increase in popularity for consumer device charging. Rectifier characteristics like efficiency, compactness, impedance tunability, and harmonic content make the multi-level switched capacitor rectifier (MSC) an exceptional candidate for modern WPT systems. The MSC shares the voltage conversion characteristics of a post-rectification buck-boost topology, reduces waveform distortion via its multi-level modulation scheme, demonstrates tank tunability via the phase control inherent to actively switched rectifiers, and accomplishes all this without a bulky filter inductor. In this work, the MSC WPT system operation is explained, and a loss model is constructed. A prototype system is used to validate the ...

Integration Of Blockchain Technology Into Automobiles To Prevent And Study The Causes Of Accidents, John Kim

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Automobile collisions occur daily. We now live in an information-driven world, one where technology is quickly evolving. Blockchain technology can change the automotive industry, the safety of the motoring public and its surrounding environment by incorporating this vast array of information. It can place safety and efficiency at the forefront to pedestrians, public establishments, and provide public agencies with pertinent information securely and efficiently. Other industries where Blockchain technology has been effective in are as follows: supply chain management, logistics, and banking. This paper reviews some statistical information regarding automobile collisions, Blockchain technology, Smart Contracts, Smart Cities; assesses the feasibility ...

Automated Flight Controller Adaptive Compensation For Actuator Failures In Transport Type Aircraft, Daniel James Fresella

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Aircraft operate over a wide range of conditions including atmospheric, weight, and center ofgravity changes. This presents a substantial challenge to automatic control system designers. When these operating conditions are merged with a partial or full control surface failure, automatic flight control is near impossible with conventional controllers. Additionally, when pilots experience control failure emergencies during flight, workload and fatigue increase drastically. The continued research of automatic flight control systems that can seamlessly adapt to unmodelled failures will enable a new generation of robust aircraft control. In this paper a 9th order 6 degree of freedom aircraft model is used ...

Collaborative Human-Machine Interfaces For Mobile Manipulators., Shamsudeen Olawale Abubakar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The use of mobile manipulators in service industries as both agents in physical Human Robot Interaction (pHRI) and for social interactions has been on the increase in recent times due to necessities like compensating for workforce shortages and enabling safer and more efficient operations amongst other reasons. Collaborative robots, or co-bots, are robots that are developed for use with human interaction through direct contact or close proximity in a shared space with the human users. The work presented in this dissertation focuses on the design, implementation and analysis of components for the next-generation collaborative human machine interfaces (CHMI) needed for ...

Mems Device Demonstration For High School Students Or Nonspecialists, Jeffrey Meng, Gyuseok L. Kim, Gabriel Unger

Educational Materials

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) devices have many unique advantages, and offer an exciting entrance for students into the field of nanotechnology and nanofabrication. In this article, an educational hands-on laboratory protocol with MEMS devices is proposed. Using a paper airplane, an Arduino, and the MPU 6050 MEMS accelerometer/gyroscope sensor students are able to create a graphical aircraft attitude indicator. The data is then processed on the Arduino, which is connected to a computer. The computer can then run graphics software displaying a digital aircraft attitude indicator showing the roll and pitch of the aircraft live.