Engineering Commons^™

Examining The Wording Of Digital Synthesizer Presets To Help Novice Producers, Nicholas O'Toole

Honors Theses

My research looks into the use of ”presets” in digital synthesizers, which alter the timbre (quality) of the synthesizer’s sound by loading in pre-selected configurations of settings. My study compares imagery- based and feelings-based preset names – for example, Cloud City Keys and Mellow lead, respectively – in an attempt to see which better predicts the sound it represents. Through my results, I will then explain how the wording of these preset names affected my subjects’ perception of certain sounds. The results I found lead me to believe that imagery-based preset names could be representative of their respective presets’ sounds.

An Ios Application For Visually Impaired Individuals To Assist With Crossing Roads, Ali Khan

Honors Theses

In day-to-day life, visually impaired individuals face the problem of crossing roads by themselves. This project was designed and built to solve this key issue. The system is supposed to give the user a warning before approaching a crosswalk for their safety and also give information about when it is safe to cross the road. An iOS application was developed to address the problem since recent studies have discovered that a vast number of visually impaired individuals are using smartphones (iPhones in particular) due to the ease and convenience it brings to their daily life. The application should be able …

Iot Garden Frost Alarm, Andrew James

Honors Theses

Home gardeners are faced with yearly challenges due to spring frosts harming young plants. This is frequently mitigated by covering crops with frost blankets, but only on nights when a frost is predicted. In areas with less predictable climate, an unexpected frost can kill vulnerable plants, reducing the amount of food produced. A system is proposed and designed here to use internet of things (IoT) technology to enable a small weather station in the home garden to report current climate data and predict frosts, then alert the gardener in time for them to cover their plants.

The system as designed …

Human Facial Emotion Recognition System In A Real-Time, Mobile Setting, Claire Williamson

Honors Theses

The purpose of this project was to implement a human facial emotion recognition system in a real-time, mobile setting. There are many aspects of daily life that can be improved with a system like this, like security, technology and safety.

There were three main design requirements for this project. The first was to get an accuracy rate of 70%, which must remain consistent for people with various distinguishing facial features. The second goal was to have one execution of the system take no longer than half of a second to keep it as close to real time as possible. Lastly, …

Exploring The Behavior Repertoire Of A Wireless Vibrationally Actuated Tensegrity Robot, Zongliang Ji

Honors Theses

Soft robotics is an emerging field of research due to its potential to explore and operate in unstructured, rugged, and dynamic environments. However, the properties that make soft robots compelling also make them difficult to robustly control. Here at Union, we developed the world’s first wireless soft tensegrity robot. The goal of my thesis is to explore effective and efficient methods to explore the diverse behavior our tensegrity robot. We will achieve that by applying state-of-art machine learning technique and a novelty search algorithm.

Design Of A Model Rocket Flight Logging System And In-Air Deployable Rover, Sirus Negahban

Honors Theses

The goal of the project laid out in this paper is to develop a model rocket range and altitude tracking system and a payload for said rocket which conducts an experiment of some scientific merit. The requirements for the project are defined by the rules of an international model rocket design and build competition for undergraduate and graduate students. This paper presents a design to accomplish the specified goals to the standards of the competition rule set, for use by the Union College Rocket Team at the competition. First, an off-the-shelf flight computer is purchased to implement the range and …

Role Of Diagnostic Monitoring Software Versus Fault-Tolerant Components In The Development Of Spacecraft Avionics Systems, Andrew Attorri

Honors Theses

In any spacecraft, there are several systems that must work simultaneously to ensure a safe mission. One critical system is the ‘avionics’ system, which is comprised of all of the electronic controls on-board the spacecraft, as well as radio links to other craft and ground stations. These systems are present for both manned or unmanned spacecraft.

Throughout the history of spaceflight, there have been several disasters related to avionics failures. To make these systems safer and more reliable, two main strategies have been adopted. The first, more established approach is through use of fault-tolerant components, which can operate under a …

Development Of A Fully Instrumented, Resonant Tensegrity Strut, Kentaro Barhydt

Honors Theses

A tensegrity is a structure composed of a series of rigid members connected in static equilibrium by tensile elements. A vibrating tensegrity robot is an underactuated system in which a set of its struts are vibrated at certain frequency combinations to achieve various locomotive gaits. Evolutionary robotics research lead by Professor John Rieffel focuses on exploiting the complex dynamics of tensegrity structures to control locomotion in vibrating tensegrity robots by finding desired gaits using genetic algorithms. A current hypothesis of interest is that the optimal locomotive gaits of a vibrating tensegrity exist at its resonant frequencies.

In order to observe …

An Internet Of Things (Iot) Robotic Light Switch, Arsal Habib

Honors Theses

The purpose of this project was to design and build an Internet of Things (IoT) Robotic Light Switch. This light switch would act as a complementary device to existing toggle switches and equip them with typical smart device features such as remote control (via Wi-Fi), digital voice assistant control, motion-sensing and integration with other smart home solutions (such as IFTTT). All these features would be supported by a dedicated web page that would also be able to view the usage statistics of the device. This device is aimed at offering users an extremely easy-to-install home automation solution that needs no …

Control System For 3d Printable Robotic Hand, Htoo Wai Htet

Honors Theses

Humanoid robotics is a growing area of research due to its potential applications in orthosis and prosthesis for human beings. With the currently available technologies, the most advanced robotic hands used in prosthetics or robotics can cost from $11,000 to $90,000, making it inaccessible to the general population of amputees and robotics hobbyists. Most of the features provided by these expensive technologies are superfluous to many users, creating a great gap in cost and services between users and technology. Using the emerging 3D printing technology, my project is to construct a 3D printed robotic hand that can reproduce as many …

Classifying System Call Traces Using Anomalous Detection, William Doyle

Honors Theses

We used data mining techniques to detect intrusions among system call traces and have outlined our results. Recent work at the intersection of security and machine learning has lead to better understanding of anomalous intrusion detection. There is a need to more thoroughly understand how anomaly detection can be used because of its potential applications and advantages over current standard methods. In this thesis, we report on a new approach of anomalous detection using system call traces. Our goal is to be able to create a system that can accurately detect hacking attacks by analyzing the sequences of system calls …

Evolving Soft Robots With Vibration Based Movement, Andrew Danise

Honors Theses

Creating effective designs for soft robots is extremely difficult due to the large number of different possibilities for shape, material properties, and movement mechanisms. Due to the lack of methods to design soft robots, previous research has used evolutionary algorithms to tackle this problem of overwhelming options. A popular technique is to use generative encodings to create designs using evolutionary algorithms because of their modularity and ability to induce large scale coordinated change. The main drawback of generative encodings is that it is difficult to know where along the ontogenic trajectory resides the phenotype with the highest fitness. The two …

Designing A Self-Powered Device To Aid In Fencing Training And Scoring, Zak Smolen

Honors Theses

The purpose of this project is to redesign a currently available electric training tool for the sport of fencing in order to fix several existing faults such as cost and power use. The second stage of this project uses this new low-power design to explore small-scale energy harvesting by integrating a charging mechanism into the device to generate power from the movements of the fencer. This goal of this project is to research and explore modern low-power device design, at both the hardware and software levels, and then to apply those techniques to improve a real-world product. The final result …

The Design Of A Maneuverable Rolling Robot, David Carabis

Honors Theses

The purpose of this project was to design, fabricate, and test a maneuverable rolling robot. Although some other rolling robots were researched for this project, a novel approach was taken to design a unique, cheap robot that could turn and was fully enclosed by a rotating outer shell. The design and research phase of this project included the evaluation of several designs, the development of a mathematical model detailing forward motion of the robot, and the derivation of several design equations. Of the possible designs, an interior counterweight was chosen to provide a torque to the outside shell and move …

Union Advanced Educational Robot, Erik Skorina

Honors Theses

Our project was the design and construction of a medium sized (approximately 40 kg when fully loaded) mobile robot for educational and research use. This robot was designed to provide a strong baseline chassis with sensors, actuators and necessary software to allow for easy integration with existing robotic equipment, software and curricula. In particular, it was designed for use in intermediate and advanced undergraduate robotics courses and undergraduate research projects in robotics.

I Am The Robot. Are You?, Rachel Michelle Feldman

Honors Theses

I was originally inspired by a previous project in a 3D modeling class. For my final project, I designed two robots; male and female; who’s naked bodied reflected the presence of technological communications in society and lack of face-to-face interactions. I displayed the robots in a variety of sexual positions, which appear cute or sweet to the viewer because of the toon-shader effect. The toon-shader effect makes the 3D models look like cartoons. I loved combining the idea of technology, robotics, and sex into one. To this day, the poster of the robots in my room always gets a response. …

Mobile Application Development: The Mobile Intoxication Assessment Tool, Adam Burns

Honors Theses

This research and development undertaking during the senior year is a culmination of undergraduate study at Union College and is an opportunity to put knowledge gained to use. The purpose of this specific capstone project is to bring together not just the research and implementation techniques learned as a Computer Engineer but to also meld this discipline with another; Neuroscience. The objective of the project was to develop a full function software prototype in the form of a mobile phone application. The mobile application (Mobile Intoxication Assessment Tool) constitutes a grouping of simple subtasks that can be completed on the …

A Gps Enabled Ipod Touch For Skiers, Camila Dorin

Honors Theses

The purpose of my senior project was to design and build a system that provides GPS capabilities to the iPod touch. The system is used in conjunction with an iPod application, giving skiers the possibility to have access to the following outputs: graph of speed during run, distance skied, calories burned, and map of the slopes followed. The system consists of a GPS receiver, an Arduino microcontroller, a Wifi Shield, and iPod touch, and an iPod application. A central point during the development of the system was the transmission of data from one piece of hardware to the other and …

Scalable Co-Evolution Of Soft Robot Properties And Gaits, Davis K. Knox

Honors Theses

The field of soft robotics is very promising; applications in-clude urban search and rescue and covert surveillance, but these projects are not yet realized, partly because of the difficulties in soft robot shape and locomotion design. Be-cause of this, traditional design methods do not prove to be effective. This project attempts to come up with solu-tions to this soft robot design problem; utilizing a genetic algorithm, a computer simulation of Darwin’s “Survival of the Fittest,” this project attempts to make soft bodies move. This genetic algorithm evaluates each solution in simulation, and assigns each one a fitness based on distance …