Engineering Commons^™

A General-Purpose Software Platform For Closed-Loop Neuromodulation, William Engelhardt

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Implementing closed-loop neuromodulation therapies is a challenging and expensive endeavor. It requires developing software capable of acquiring signals from a bio-signal amplifier, analysis of these signals, and initiation of precisely timed stimulation, all of which need to be accomplished in real-time with very low latency. Developing this software is difficult, as it requires a wide range of expertise ranging from interfacing with hardware to real-time signal processing. Even when successfully implementing such a system for one set of hardware, it often then only works within the laboratory that conceived it. This is because of the inherent heterogeneity in the devices …

Procedural City Generation With Combined Architectures For Real-Time Visualization, Griffin Poyck

All Theses

The work and research of this paper sought to build upon traditional city generation and simulation in creating a tool that both realistically simulates cities and their prominent features and also creates aesthetic and artistically rich cities using assets that combine several contemporary or near contemporary architectural styles. The major city features simulated are the surrounding terrain, road networks, individual buildings, and building placement. The tools used to both create and integrate these features were created in Houdini with Unreal Engine 5 as the intended final destination. This research was influenced by the city, town, and road networking of Ghost …

Edge Processing Of Image For Uas Sense And Avoidance, Christopher J. Rave

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Today there is a large market for Unmanned Aerial Systems. Although most current systems are remotely piloted by operators on the ground, increasingly, many of these systems will use some sort of automatic flight controller to help mitigate new challenges, due to their deployment at growing scale. These challenges include, but are not limited to, shortage of FAA-certified UAS pilots, transmission bandwidth and delay constraints and cyber security threats associated with wireless networking, profitability of operations constrained by energy capacity and efficiency and air dynamics planning, and etc. In order to address these rising challenges, this thesis is a part …

Adaptive Two-Stage Edge-Centric Architecture For Deeply-Learned Embedded Real-Time Target Classification In Aerospace Sense-And-Avoidance Applications, Nicholas A. Speranza

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

With the growing number of Unmanned Aircraft Systems, current network-centric architectures present limitations in meeting real-time and time-critical requirements. Current methods utilizing centralized off-platform processing have inherent energy inefficiencies, scalability challenges, performance concerns, and cyber vulnerabilities. In this dissertation, an adaptive, two-stage, energy-efficient, edge-centric architecture is proposed to address these limitations. A novel, edge-centric Sense-and-Avoidance architecture framework is presented, and a corresponding prototype is developed using commercial hardware to validate the proposed architecture. Instead of a network-centric approach, processing is distributed at the logical edge of the sensors, and organized as Detection and Classification Subsystems. Classical machine vision algorithms are …

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, …

Rocket Telemetry System, Monica Lacek, Clark Bryant Iii, David Dalvin, Nicholas Wolgamott

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The goal of this research project is to design a system for the Akronauts Rocket Design Team which will transmit flight data in real-time to a ground station. The data will be collected from various sensors (altitude, acceleration, GPS, etc). This data will be transmitted wirelessly and in real-time to a receiving station. Calculations and visualizations will be taken from the data, which will help the team improve their rocket designs. Additionally, GPS data will be useful to locate the rocket post-flight. Challenges will include the need for the system to transmit over the range of the rocket’s flight and …

Enabling Robust Distributed Real-Time Hybrid Simulation Method And Expanding Its Applications In Floating Wind Turbine Systems, Mehmet Cinar

Masters Theses

Real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS), which integrates physical experiment and numerical simulation, plays an essential role in understanding the time-dependent behavior of structures when subject to hazardous loadings. On the other hand, RTHS might not yield accurate results for complex structural systems due to experimental and computational limitations. Distributed real-time hybrid simulation (dRTHS), which takes the advantage of distributed laboratory facilities using network communications, was proposed and proven to address some limitations in RTHS. During dRTHS, Internet delay due to the network communication is added to the actuator delay in RTHS, which may cause inaccurate results or even unstable tests. To …

Travel Time Estimation On Urban Arterials - A Real Time Aspect, Jingcheng Wu

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to develop simple and direct approaches to estimate the vehicle queue length and travel time along signalized arterial links for real-time traffic operations. This dissertation is the first to demonstrate a process using vehicle trajectory data to generate detector volume, speed and time occupancy data, along with the generalized flow rate, density and space mean speed data. This approach minimizes detector over-counting and miss-counting issues. The detection zone can be of any shape or size and at any location along the trajectory. The relationships among detector volume, speed and time occupancy along signalized arterials are analyzed theoretically …

Optimal Scheduling Of Energy Storage For Energy Shifting And Ancillary Services To The Grid, Hadi Khani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is mainly focused on developing optimization-based models for scheduling of energy storage units. At first, a real-time optimal scheduling algorithm is developed seeking to maximize the storage revenue by exploiting arbitrage opportunities available due to the inter-temporal variation of electricity prices. The electricity price modulation is proposed as an approach to competitively offer incentive by the utility regulator to storage to fill the gap between current and a stable rate of return. Subsequently, the application of large-scale storage for congestion relief in transmission systems as an ancillary service to the grid is investigated. An algorithm is proposed for …

A Small Acoustic Goniometer For General Purpose Research, Michael Pook

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Understanding acoustic events and monitoring their occurrence is a useful aspect of many research projects. In particular, acoustic goniometry allows researchers to determine the source of an event based solely on the sound it produces. The vast majority of the acoustic goniometry research projects used custom hardware targeted to the specific application under test. Unfortunately, due to the wide range of sensing applications, a flexible general purpose hardware/firmware system does not exist for this research. This dissertation focuses on the development of such a system which encourages the continued exploration of general purpose hardware/firmware and lowers barriers to research in …

The Lecturescribe Platform, Kevin Backers, Kevin Feutz, Erik Owen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The LectureScribe platform is a free classroom transcription service that is deployed as a website. The platform allows professors to talk into a microphone, and deaf or hard of hearing students have the ability to see what the professor is saying in real time on their personal device. LectureScribe was created by three Cal Poly Software Engineering students. This document details the platform itself, as well as the developers’ process of creating this software system over the span of two academic quarters.

Systematic Study Of The Biological Effects Of Nitric Oxide (No) Using Innovative No Measurement And Delivery Systems, Weilue He

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Nitric oxide (NO) is recognized as the most important small signaling molecule in the human body. An imbalance of NO is closely associated with many serious diseases such as neurological disorders, cardiovascular diseases, chronic inflammations and cancers. Herein two chemiluminescence-based devices (a real-time NO measurement device and a controllable NO delivery device) were developed to facilitate the NO quantitative study and obtain information for NO related drug design.

The first device used for real-time measuring NO(g) flux from living cells was developed and validated. The principle was to use a two-chamber design, with a cell culture chamber and a gaseous …

Optimisation Of Stand-Alone Hydrogen-Based Renewable Energy Systems Using Intelligent Techniques, Adel Brka

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Wind and solar irradiance are promising renewable alternatives to fossil fuels due to their availability and topological advantages for local power generation. However, their intermittent and unpredictable nature limits their integration into energy markets. Fortunately, these disadvantages can be partially overcome by using them in combination with energy storage and back-up units. However, the increased complexity of such systems relative to single energy systems makes an optimal sizing method and appropriate Power Management Strategy (PMS) research priorities.

This thesis contributes to the design and integration of stand-alone hybrid renewable energy systems by proposing methodologies to optimise the sizing and operation …

Real-Time And Energy-Efficient Routing For Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks, Chengjie Wu

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

With the emergence of industrial standards such as WirelessHART, process industries are adopting Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks (WSANs) that enable sensors and actuators to communicate through low-power wireless mesh networks. Industrial monitoring and control applications require real-time communication among sensors, controllers and actuators within end-to-end deadlines. Deadline misses may lead to production inefficiency, equipment destruction to irreparable financial and environmental impacts. Moreover, due to the large geographic area and harsh conditions of many industrial plants, it is labor-intensive or dan- gerous to change batteries of field devices. It is therefore important to achieve long network lifetime with battery-powered devices.

This dissertation …

Real-Time Hybrid Simulation With Online Model Updating, Adam Mueller

Masters Theses

Hybrid simulations have shown great potential for economic and reliable assessment of structural seismic performance through a combination of physically tested components, called the experimental substructure, and numerically simulated components, called the numerical substructure. Current hybrid simulation practices often use a fixed numerical model without considering the possible availability of a more accurate model obtained during hybrid simulation through an online model updating technique. To address this limitation and improve the reliability of numerical models in hybrid simulations, this study describes the implementation of an online model updating method in real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS). The Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) was …

Exploring Hybrid Spm-Cache Architectures To Improve Performance And Energy Efficiency For Real-Time Computing, Lan Wu

Theses and Dissertations

Real-time computing is not just fast computing but time-predictable computing. Many tasks in safety-critical embedded real-time systems have hard real-time characteristics. Failure to meet deadlines may result in the loss of life or in large damages. Known of Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) is important for reliability or correct functional behavior of the system. As multi-core processors are increasingly adopted in industry, it has become a great challenge to accurately bound the worst-case execution time (WCET) for real-time systems running on multi-core chips. This is particularly true because of the inter-thread interferences in accessing shared resources on multi-cores, such as …

Real Time Rendering Engine, Kevin Ubay-Ubay

Computer Engineering

Entertaining and playable content in computer graphics requires real time rendering. Real time rendering essentially demands that frames need to be rendered within milliseconds in order to deliver an interactive experience for the client. Video games are an example of such a medium that needs real time rendering. Without frame rates in the realm of real time, video games cannot deliver an enjoyable experience. Behind virtually every video game is an engine. The architecture of video game engines usually comprises of sub engines that are specifically designed to handle physics, audio, user input and rendering. The purpose of this project …

Touchspice Vs. Reactive-Spice: A Human-Computer Interaction Perspective, Joshua Martin O'Hara

Master's Theses

Traditional SPICE simulation tools and applications of circuit theory lack real-time interaction and feedback. The goal of this thesis was to create an interactive physical environment to allow the manipulation and simulation of discrete electrical components in near-real-time while optimizing and streamlining the human-computer interaction (HCI) elements to make the user experience as positive and transparent as possible. This type of HCI and near-real-time simulation feedback would allow for the instant realization of how the parameters of each discrete component or hardware module affect the overall simulation and response of the circuit.

The scope of this thesis is to research, …

Adaptive Energy Management Scheme In Real-Time Energy Harvesting Embedded Systems, Shruti Khare

Master's Theses

The main purpose of this thesis was to develop an online adaptive energy management scheme for energy harvesting embedded systems. Two energy prediction schemes were used, namely Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) and Adaptive Forward Prediction (AFP), to schedule all the tasks with least deadline miss rate. The AFP scheme has a mean relative error of 6-10% which is much lower than exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) algorithm with an error of 30%. The large difference in the error percentage between the two prediction algorithms is due to the adaptive nature of AFP as it tracks small changes in input …

Timing Of Residential Electric Loads To Reduce Air Emissions From Power Generation, Michelle Marinich Rogers

Wayne State University Theses

Over the course of a day, power utilities must respond to changing demand by dispatching or shedding output from different generators. Each generator is associated with a unique profile of air emissions, based on the type of fuel consumed, installed pollution controls, and the generator's efficiency. The aim of this study is to determine whether shifting electric demand to times when cleaner generation sources are available would result in overall emissions reduction.

Dynamic wholesale pricing in the electric power market, specifically the Locational Marginal Price (LMP), provides a means to estimate the marginal generator fuel type. This knowledge was used …

St. Jude Medical: An Object-Oriented Software Architecture For Embedded And Real-Time Medical Devices, Atila Amiri

Master's Theses

Medical devices used for surgical or therapeutic purposes require a high degree of safety and effectiveness. Software is critical component of many such medical devices. The software architecture of a system defines organizational structure and the runtime characteristic of the application used to control the operation of the system and provides a set of frameworks that are used to develop that. As such, the design of software architecture is a critical element in achieving the intended functionality, performance, and safety requirements of a medical device. This architecture uses object-oriented design techniques, which model the underlying system as a set of …

Real-Time Model Predictive Control Of Quasi-Keyhole Pipe Welding, Kun Qian

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Quasi-keyhole, including plasma keyhole and double-sided welding, is a novel approach proposed to operate the keyhole arc welding process. It can result in a high quality weld, but also raise higher demand of the operator. A computer control system to detect the keyhole and control the arc current can improve the performance of the welding process. To this effect, developing automatic pipe welding, instead of manual welding, is a hot research topic in the welding field.

The objective of this research is to design an automatic quasi-keyhole pipe welding system that can monitor the keyhole and control its establishment time …

Real-Time Optical Flow Sensor Design And Its Application On Obstacle Detection, Zhaoyi Wei

Theses and Dissertations

Motion is one of the most important features describing an image sequence. Motion estimation has been widely applied in structure from motion, vision-based navigation and many other fields. However, real-time motion estimation remains a challenge because of its high computational expense. The traditional CPU-based scheme cannot satisfy the power, size and computation requirements in many applications. With the availability of new parallel architectures such as FPGAs and GPUs, applying these new technologies to computer vision tasks such as motion estimation has been an active research field in recent years. In this dissertation, FPGAs have been applied to real-time motion estimation …

Real-Time Automatic Linear Feature Detection In Images, Guang Zeng

All Dissertations

Linear feature detection in digital images is an important low-level operation in
computer vision that has many applications. In remote sensing tasks, it can be used
to extract roads, railroads, and rivers from satellite or low-resolution aerial images,
which can be used for the capture or update of data for geographic information and
navigation systems. In addition, it is useful in medical imaging for the extraction of
blood vessels from an X-ray angiography or the bones in the skull from a CT or MR
image. It also can be applied in horticulture for underground plant root detection in
minirhizotron images. …

Multi-Functional, Self-Sensing And Automated Real-Time Non-Contact Liquid Dispensing System, Qiong Shen

Dissertations

Liquid dispensing in the order of pico-liter has become more and more important in biology, electronics and micro-electronic-mechanical-system (MEMS) during the past two decades due to the rapid progress of researches on the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) microarray, compact and low-cost direct write technology (DWT), organic semiconductors and nano-particles.

The existing approaches, commercialized or experimental, to liquid dispensing in minute amounts have one common shortcoming: open loop control, i.e., they have no direct control on the quality of dispensed liquid. In contrast, the SmartPin has intrinsic self-sensing capability to not only control the process of liquid dispensing, but also the results …

Real-Time Raman Spectroscopy And Wide-Angle X-Ray Diffraction During Single-Layer And Multi-Layer Blown Film Extrusion, Giriprasath Gururajan

All Dissertations

Properties exhibited by blown films are controlled by the microstructure developed during their processing. Therefore, real-time measurement of microstructure during the blown film extrusion can help in better control and optimization of the process needed to obtain desired properties. The objectives of this research were (i) to conduct real-time microstructural measurements during single-layer and multi-layer blown film extrusion of polypropylene (PP) and low-density polyethylene (LDPE) using real-time Raman spectroscopy; (ii) to conduct real-time wide-angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD) during single-layer blown film extrusion of LDPE to obtain crystallinity and orientation values during the process; and (iii) to investigate the effect of …

Real-Time Realistic Rendering Of Nature Scenes With Dynamic Lighting, Kevin Boulanger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rendering of natural scenes has interested the scientific community for a long time due to its numerous applications. The targeted goal is to create images that are similar to what a viewer can see in real life with his/her eyes. The main obstacle is complexity: nature scenes from real life contain a huge number of small details that are hard to model, take a lot of time to render and require a huge amount of memory unavailable in current computers. This complexity mainly comes from geometry and lighting. The goal of our research is to overcome this complexity and to …

Hardware Support For A Configurable Architecture For Real-Time Embedded Systems On A Programmable Chip, Spencer W. Isaacson

Theses and Dissertations

Current FPGA technology has advanced to the point that useful embedded SoPCs can now be designed. The Real Time Processor (RTP) project at Brigham Young University leverages the advances in FPGA technology with a system architecture that is customizable to specific applications. A simple real-time processor has been designed to provide support for a hardware-assisted real-time operating system providing fast context switches. As part of the hardware RTOS, the following have been implemented in hardware: scheduler, register banks, mutex, semaphore, queue, interrupts, event, and others. A novel circuit called the Task-Resource Matrix has been created to allow fast inter/intra processor …

Performance Of Mimo Space-Time Coding Algorithms On A Parallel Dsp Test Platform, Beau C. Neal

Theses and Dissertations

Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) hardware has the advantages of low cost, modularity, and is easily upgraded. For Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) space-time algorithms to be practical they must have the processing capability to execute in real-time. This makes COTS ideal for real-time MIMO research where the processing power increases exponentially with a linear increase in antennas. The BYU Electrical Engineering wireless lab has designed and built an eight processor transmitter and a twenty processor receiver to research and develop MIMO wireless communication. The Alamouti, 2 x 2 and 4 x 4 differential space-time MIMO algorithms have been partially implemented on …

Settling-Time Improvements In Positioning Machines Subject To Nonlinear Friction Using Adaptive Impulse Control, Tim Hakala

Theses and Dissertations

A new method of adaptive impulse control is developed to precisely and quickly control the position of machine components subject to friction. Friction dominates the forces affecting fine positioning dynamics. Friction can depend on payload, velocity, step size, path, initial position, temperature, and other variables. Control problems such as steady-state error and limit cycles often arise when applying conventional control techniques to the position control problem. Studies in the last few decades have shown that impulsive control can produce repeatable displacements as small as ten nanometers without limit cycles or steady-state error in machines subject to dry sliding friction. These …