Engineering Commons^™

Multi-Robot System Control Architecture (Mrsca) For Agricultural Production, Santosh Pitla, Joe D. Luck, Scott A. Shearer

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Presentations and White Papers

Coordinating multiple autonomous robots for achieving an assigned collective task presents a complex engineering challenge. In this paper multi robot system control architecture (MRSCA) for the coordination of multiple agricultural robots is developed. The two important aspects of MRSCA; coordination strategy and inter-robot communication were discussed with typical agricultural tasks as examples. Classification of MRS into homogeneous and heterogeneous robots was done to identify appropriate form of cooperative behavior and inter-robot communication. The framework developed, proposes that inter-robot communication is not always required for a MRS. Three types of cooperative behaviors; No-cooperation, modest cooperation and absolute cooperation for a MRS …

Pneumatic Control Of A Variable Orifice Nozzle, Joe D. Luck, Michael P. Sama, Santosh Pitla, Scott A. Shearer

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Presentations and White Papers

A variable-orifice nozzle with droplet optimization was recently developed and introduced for use on agricultural sprayers. The VariTarget (VT) nozzle reacts to changes in the system flow rate via a metering assembly that is controlled by a diaphragm and spring. As the liquid pressure changes, the VT metering assembly attempts to control the flow rate and spray pattern exiting the nozzle. The goal of this study was to replace the spring controlled “reactive” system with a pneumatically controlled metering assembly. The proposed system would allow for the metering assembly to adjust the flow rate and spray pattern exiting the nozzle …

Geophysical Mapping Of Preferential Flow Paths Across Multiple Floodplains, Ronald B. Miller, Derek M. Heeren, Garey A. Fox, Daniel E. Storm, Todd Halihan, Aaron R. Mittelstet

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

In the Ozark ecoregion of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri, the erosion of carbonate bedrock (primarily limestone) by slightly acidic water has left a residuum of chert gravel, producing gravel-bed streams and floodplains generally consisting of coarse chert gravel overlain by a mantle (1 to 300 cm) of gravelly loam or silt loam. Previous research has documented the occurrence of preferential flow paths (PFP) in an alluvial floodplain hypothesized to be a buried gravel bar. Field experiments have shown that the PFP affected alluvial groundwater flow in the floodplain and that water flow in the PFP was transmitted at rates that …

Magnetic Design Web Application, Michael Brim

Electrical Engineering

The automated Magnetic Design Web Application, available at http://www.magneticdesign.org, generates the full design process of a power transformer, gapped inductor and toroidal inductor given design specifications provided by the user. Calculations are accomplished using Area Product, Ap, or Core Geometry, Kg, procedures. All design processes mirror the format used in Dr. Taufik’s Introduction to Magnetic Design lecture-notes. An administrative backend is provided where instructors can add or modify core design values to expand the array of materials used. The project aims to aid student understanding of magnetic design and course concepts while allowing instructors to broaden the scope of material …

Limitations Of Poole–Frenkel Conduction In Bilayer Hfo2/Sio2 Mos Devices, Richard G. Southwick Iii, Justin Reed, Christopher Buu, Ross Butler, Gennadi Bersuker, William B. Knowlton

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The gate leakage current of metal–oxide– semiconductors (MOSs) composed of hafnium oxide (HfO₂) exhibits temperature dependence, which is usually attributed to the standard Poole–Frenkel (P–F) transport model. However, the reported magnitudes of the trap barrier height vary significantly. This paper explores the fundamental challenges associated with applying the P–F model to describe transport in HfO₂/SiO₂ bilayers in n/p MOS field-effect transistors composed of 3- and 5-nm HfO₂ on 1.1-nm SiO₂ dielectric stacks. The extracted P–F trap barrier height is shown to be dependent on several variables including the following: the temperature range, method …

The Surface Expression Of Semidiurnal Internal Tides Near A Strong Source At Hawaii. Part I: Observations And Numerical Predictions, Cedric Chavanne, P. Flament, Glenn S. Carter, M. Merrifield, D. Luther, Edward D. Zaron, K. W. Gurgel

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Observations of semidiurnal currents fromhigh-frequency radioDoppler currentmeters andmoored acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) in the Kauai Channel, Hawaii, are described and compared with two primitive equation numerical models of the tides. The Kauai Channel, separating the islands of Oahu and Kauai, is a site of strong internal tide generation by the barotropic tides flowing over Kaena Ridge, the subsurface extension of Oahu. The nature and impacts of internal tide generation in the Kauai Channel were intensively studied during the 2002–03 near-field component of the Hawaii Ocean Mixing Experiment. Comparisons of observed coherent (i.e., phase locked to the astronomical forcing)M_{2 …}

Simulation Of Cal Poly Super System Simulink Model Using Insolation Variation, Jacob Kory

Electrical Engineering

This senior project focuses on simulation of the Cal Poly SuPER system using an insolation model. First, local and historical weather data is examined to determine the range of limits that the model will utilize. Then, the insolation model is constructed to fit into the existing SuPER model. The overall system is tested under a variety of insolation values to determine system performance of motor and static loads. Based on these simulations, several factors of the current model are discovered that limit the power consumption profile under off-peak load conditions. Finally, recommendations on improvements to the model are discussed

Analog Electric Guitar Distortion Effects And Headphone Amplification, Michael Alexander Jenkins

Electrical Engineering

The goal of this project was to create an electronic system which integrates popular audio processing effects as well as headphone amplification circuitry for use with an electric guitar. By implementing a system which fits natively inside the body of an electric guitar, the need for numerous external accessories relating to a standalone amplifier system is eliminated, improving device versatility and portability.

Ultrasonic Listener: Microcontroller Based Frequency Shifter, Troy Fredriks

Electrical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Fm Radio Receiver With Digital Demodulation, Nicholas Burnett

Electrical Engineering

This paper reports on the design, construction, and testing of an FM receiver. The design is split into two portions, the analog FM front end and the digital demodulator. The job of the front end is to down convert the RF signal to a frequency that is low enough to sample with an analog to digital converter. The construction of the front end is done using what is known as “Ugly Construction.” That is, all the components are soldered together floating over a ground plane.

The second portion of the design is the demodulator. The phase lock loop method of …

Single-Ended Tube-Based Guitar Amplifier, Joseph (Joe) Linn

Electrical Engineering

Since the advent of the transistor, the vast majority of designers and manufacturers of electronic devices have abandoned the vacuum tube. Compared to transistors, tubes are orders of magnitude larger, more power hungry, more expensive, less reliable, and dissipate much more heat. In short, transistors are superior devices for almost all applications. Despite this fact, many makers of high-end audio and instrument amplifiers continue to base their designs on tube technology.

Given all of their shortcomings, the obvious question is: Why bother with tubes? Proponents of tube-based audio amplifiers cite a certain “warmth” that tube circuitry lends to the sound …

Mixing Digital And Analog Audio Signals, David Robison

Electrical Engineering

I have been playing the drums for thirteen years. I started out on an electric drum set and then progressed to an acoustic set. I have always wondered what it would sound like to combine the two types of sounds and this senior project dissected that interest to its raw form. Delving into the problems and solutions of combining digital and analog audio signals intrigued me and thus, became my senior project. The design process included research into the analog and digital realms, computer simulations, and actual implementation successes and failures.

The signal path begins at the bass drum where …

Touch Screen Sound Controller, James Fenley, Jonathan Law

Electrical Engineering

The Touch Screen Sound Controller sets out to explore the use of a touch screen as a sound control interface for the disk jockey profession. In addition, the project aims to provide an alternate means of transferring audio data by way of TCP/IP communications as opposed to MIDI. By applying our method, a user may stream pulse-code modulated data from a server onto a client’s RAM via an Ethernet connection. A 32bit, 200MHz ARM9 microprocessor addresses data from the RAM and proceeds with executing DSP instructions from the user. The connection between the touch screen and the central microprocessor is …

Improved Commuter Rail Workstation Table Through Crash Energy Management, Trevor Ness, Brandon Baker

Mechanical Engineering

Workstation tables in commuter rail trains have been identified as an area for improving passenger safety during train collisions. The goal of this senior project was to create such a table using a composite sandwich structure designed to safely absorb energy. Testing of previous table designs was used to establish engineering specifications for the static loading, work surface durability, and impact performance requirements of the new table. Analytical and finite element models were used to analyze new concepts until a design was achieved that could meet all specifications. The tabletop developed consists of a crushable aluminum honeycomb core with fiberglass …

Adapted Paddle Launch Vehicle, Duane Menton, Erik Granstrom, Matthew Resendez, Shannon Crilly

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Edwards Lifesciences: Heart Valve Tension Validation, Lucas Fochler, Alex Mark, Shilpan Shah

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

The San Luis Obispo Children's Museum Energy Of Motion, Patrick Ligot, Brian Mich, Jaime Salazar, Erik Sanchez, Steven Azeka

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Design And Usability Of Social Networking Web Sites, Robert Pessagno

Graphic Communication

This study began by designing the layout of a new social networking Web site and putting it to practical use. A team of computer science students at Cal Poly developed this social networking site for their senior project, and called it Friend Riot. The new and innovative features that Friend Riot consists of set it apart from other popular social networking Web sites, but its interface was lacking a good design. When the new design was implemented, it was tested against the competition: Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects that Web design …

Determining The Optimal Material For Coffee Packaging: Oxygen Transmission Rates And Ink Abrasion Resistance, Laura Kiyoi

Graphic Communication

No abstract provided.

An Evaluation Of The Ability Of Rfid Tags To Withstand Distribution Of Fresh Produce In The Rpc Pooling System, Jay A. Singh, S. P. Singh, K. Desautels, K. Saha, E. Olsen

Industrial Technology and Packaging

This study focused on the ability of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags applied on reusable plastic containers (RPCs) to withstand repeated abuse due to physical distribution and storage environment related hazards. It also studied the effect of the chemical cleaning environments that RPCs are commonly exposed to in the pooling/rental systems commonly used to distribute fresh produce. RPCs are being successfully deployed in the US, Europe and Asia to ship fresh produce from growers to retailers. The increasing demand for traceability and tracking of fresh produce from ‘farm to fork’ requires these containers to be monitored and identified in the …

Laser Clean Room Re-Design: A Manufacturing Facility Re-Layout, Jennifer J. Siu

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Alcon’s Laser Clean Room fosters inefficient production practices, is outdated for its current process, and lacking in clear process/product flow. A facility re-design is applied to bring order, efficiency, and optimize flow in the laser production lines.

Deliverables include a new layout that decreases product travel distances and increases productivity as well as an implementation plan and cost/savings analysis. Major design decisions include downsizing the clean room, sorting to find waste and establishing clear process/product flows. The design was implemented within three weeks and results yield 29% reduction of product travel distance, 10.4 hrs/day saved from eliminated gowning time and …

Cable Time Estimation Database, Joshua L. Okerman

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

The use of time standards are the basis for a high efficiency system in the manufacturing environment. This project will investigate the process followed to design and develop a database used to calculate accurate cable assembly time standards used for scheduling at General Atomics. This project will then justify the use of the Cable Time Estimation Database, through an economic analysis compared to the current methods applied.

Assessing Living Arrangements In Residential Halls, Romel Penaflor Auza

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Hundreds of thousands of high school graduates head off to college each fall not knowing the environment they'll be living in for the next four years. The factors that predict success in the academic, social, and personal aspect of these freshmen students' lives revolves around one aspect that is often times overlooked. Freshmen students are subjected to the fast paced lifestyle of college and often times they need to feel “at home”. Their personal space becomes a matter that is important to them in relation to their success in the three aspects of academic success, social integration, and personal health. …

A Design-Build-Test-Fly Project Involving Modeling, Manufacturing, And Testing, Scott Post, Shankar Seetharaman, Sree Abimannan

Publications

This paper describes a junior-level semester-long class project for students in Fluid Mechanics courses. The goals of the project are to introduce students to engineering design, project management, and to incorporate material from other courses in engineering graphics, numerical methods, instrumentation and measurements, and manufacturing processes in a single project. The project focuses on airfoil design using computational tools, and the main emphasis lies on verification of results obtained from computational methods with experimentally measured values. Students will use the airfoil shape they select to make wings to go on a model foam glider. The final part of the project …

Effect Of Simulated Visual Impairment On Nighttime Driving Performance, Joanne Wood, Alex Chaparro, Trent Carberry, Byoung Sun Chu

Publications

Purpose. This study investigated the effects of simulated visual impairment on nighttime driving performance and pedestrian recognition under real-road conditions.

Methods. Closed road nighttime driving performance was measured for 20 young visually normal participants (M = 27.5 +- 6.1 years) under three visual conditions: normal vision, simulated cataracts, and refractive blur that were incorporated in modified goggles. The visual acuity levels for the cataract and blur conditions were matched for each participant. Driving measures included sign recognition, avoidance of low contrast road hazards, time to complete the course, and lane keeping. Pedestrian recognition was measured for pedestrians wearing either black …

Analytic Confusion Matrix Bounds For Fault Detection And Isolation Using A Sum-Of-Squared-Residuals Approach, Daniel J. Simon, Donald L. Simon

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Given a system which can fail in 1 of n different ways, a fault detection and isolation (FDI) algorithm uses sensor data to determine which fault is the most likely to have occurred. The effectiveness of an FDI algorithm can be quantified by a confusion matrix, also called a diagnosis probability matrix, which indicates the probability that each fault is isolated given that each fault has occurred. Confusion matrices are often generated with simulation data, particularly for complex systems. In this paper, we perform FDI using sum-of-squared residuals (SSRs). We assume that the sensor residuals are s-independent and Gaussian, which …

Preference Driven University Course Scheduling System, Heather A. Bellardo

Master's Theses

University course planning and scheduling is the process of determining what courses to offer, how many sections are needed, determining the best term to offer each section, assigning a faculty member to instruct each section, and scheduling each section to a timeslot to avoid conflicts. The result of this task has an impact on every student and faculty member in the department. The process is typically broken down into three major phases: course offering planning, faculty assignment to planned course sections, and course scheduling into timeslots.

This thesis looks at each of these phases for the Industrial and Manufacturing department …

Me-Em Enewsbrief, June 2010, Department Of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, Michigan Technological University

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering eNewsBrief

No abstract provided.

Anytime Planning For Decentralized Pomdps Using Expectation Maximization, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized POMDPs provide an expressive framework for multi-agent sequential decision making. While finite-horizon DECPOMDPs have enjoyed signifcant success, progress remains slow for the infinite-horizon case mainly due to the inherent complexity of optimizing stochastic controllers representing agent policies. We present a promising new class of algorithms for the infinite-horizon case, which recasts the optimization problem as inference in a mixture of DBNs. An attractive feature of this approach is the straightforward adoption of existing inference techniques in DBNs for solving DEC-POMDPs and supporting richer representations such as factored or continuous states and actions. We also derive the Expectation Maximization (EM) …

Development Of A Technological Literacy Course For Non-Engineering Students: Science Of High Technology, Thomas Howell, Patricia Backer, Belle Wei

Faculty Publications

As citizens, we are confronted by many global and national issues such as the dangers of greenhouse gases and the best choices for energy sources. These questions are fundamentally technical in nature and many people feel ill-equipped to understand the variety of claims and counterclaims as to what is “the truth” on these and other important scientific issues. For many people, the reaction is to give up and accept that the modern world is too complex to understand. To address these issues and improve technological literacy, the College of Engineering (CoE) at San José State University (SJSU) has implemented a …