Engineering Commons^™

Thermal And Orbital Analysis Of Darkness Cubesat, Katie Dickey

Honors Program Projects

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is sending a 3U CubeSat into LEO to search for a 3.5 keV photon corresponding to the decay of a theorized dark matter particle called the sterile neutrino. The CubeSat will encounter environmental variations while in orbit that can be computed through an orbital analysis using System’s Tool Kit. In order to minimize thermal noise readout, improve optical resolution, and increase bandwidth, the sensors must be kept below 170K while taking data. This temperature is difficult to achieve due to radiation from the Sun and the Earth’s albedo radiation. Through the thermal analysis, the lowest temperature …

Weed And Crop Discrimination Through An Offline Computer Vision Algorithm, Phillip Jamison Putney

Honors Program Projects

With the recent global interest in organic farming and cultivation, many people are turning away from chemical-based herbicides and moving towards alternate methods to extirpate weeds living amongst their crops. Of the methods proposed, robotic weed detection and removal is the most promising because of its possibility to be completely autonomous. Several robust, fully-autonomous robots have been developed, although none have been approved for commercial use. This paper proposes a weed and crop discrimination algorithm that utilizes an excessive green filter paired with principal component analysis to detect specific spatial frequencies within an image corresponding to different types of weeds …

Vocal Processing With Spectral Analysis, Bradley Fitzgerald

Honors Program Projects

A well-known signal processing issue is that of the “cocktail party problem”, which refers to the need to be able to separate speakers from a mixture of voices. A solution to this problem could provide insight into signal separation in a variety of signal processing fields. In this study, a method of vocal signal processing was examined to determine if principal component analysis of spectral data may be used to characterize differences between speakers and if these differences may be used to separate mixtures of vocal signals. Processing was done on a set of voice recordings from 30 different speakers …

Detection Systems For Airbag Deployment, Ryan S. Kee

Honors Program Projects

The airbag enablement system in today’s automobiles is not ideal and may allow airbags to deploy when they should not. Weight sensors detect pressure when someone sits in a passenger seat, enabling the airbag to deploy if an accident occurs. This system is flawed. For example, if a heavy box is placed in a passenger seat, the airbag will be unnecessarily enabled. The goal of this research project was to determine if different sensors—not weight sensors or cameras—could be used to identify the occupant of an automobile seat.

Using a microchip programmed in C language, a circuit was designed with …

Obstacle Avoidance Subsystem For An Autonomous Robot, Kirstie King

Honors Program Projects

This research project details the design and implementation of the Obstacle Avoidance Subsystem for the Tigertron autonomous robot. This subsystem is designed to function as a smaller part of the whole Software Architecture and has the purpose of detecting, through use of a Laser Rangefinder, obstacles in the vehicle’s environment. Once the hardware is set up and configured, the Tigertron’s central software control architecture requests data from the Laser Rangefinder through a serial communication channel. This data is converted into objects that represent obstacles in the form of polar coordinates. These objects are stored in a container so the central …