Engineering Commons^™

Garbage Float, Gabor Papp, Max Woolverton, Scott Ulatowski, Daniel Ross, Nicholas Gayle, Bryan Merchan-Aragon, Noah Yco, Nicholas Fawcett, Jared Wright, Abdulaziz Salman G Alshahrani, Andrew Mcquire

Mechanical and Civil Engineering Student Publications

Trash pileup in our waters is an increasing problem. Removing floating plastics and debris from our ecosystem would reduce mortality rate of marine animals. Solutions for this already exist but most of them are proprietary and expensive. Therefore, an autonomous, publicly available and cheap alternative was developed to skim and clean the water surface from garbage.

Northrop Grumman Collaboration Project, Nikkia Psomas-Sheridan, Santiago Robles, Ben Elkayam, Benjamin Ulfhake

Mechanical Engineering

The Northrop Grumman Collaboration Project (NGCP) is a collaborative club project sponsored by Northrop Grumman for the students of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (CPSLO) and Cal Poly Pomona (CPP) to create a fleet of vehicles to aid in the simulated rescue of stranded hiker. The CPSLO club is responsible for delivering an autonomous flight vehicle that can suppress a fire and retrieve a payload. Mechanical Design Team of the CPSLO team was responsible for the design of the frame, electronics housing, and payload and fire suppression systems.

Integration Of Autonomous Equipment In The Heavy Civil Industry, Jack Ryan Gutierrez

Construction Management

The heavy civil industry plays a pivotal role in shaping the infrastructure landscape, with construction equipment serving as the backbone of any project. In an industry that is constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency, productivity, and safety, autonomous construction equipment has emerged as an innovative solution to help improve these factors on a heavy civil project. The purpose of this paper is to present an in-depth look at the current state of new technology involving autonomous construction equipment, and how prevalent it is in today's heavy civil industry. Qualitative interviews that were completed with a project manager, superintendent, and …

Sensor Updates For Bigheaded Carp-Tracking Autonomous Boat, Jordan Kaufmann

Honors College Theses

Bigheaded carp are an invasive species that overpopulate and compete with the native species of Kentucky Lake as well as many other North American aquatic ecosystems. The movement patterns of Bigheaded carp are being studied nationwide by the United States Geological Survey and multiple universities. These studies ultimately seek to control their spread and reduce or reverse the ecosystem destabilization caused by this invasive species. Such studies are currently conducted manually on Kentucky Lake by graduate students affiliated with the Murray State University (MSU) Biology Department and Hancock Biological Station, and these manual studies are an arduous and time-consuming effort. …

Implementation Of Static Rfid Landmarks In Slam For Planogram Compliance, Brennan L. Drake

Honors College Theses

Autonomous robotic systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday life and exhibit robust solutions in a wide range of applications. They face many obstacles with the foremost of which being SLAM, or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, that encompasses both creation of the map of an unknown environment and localization of the robot in said environment. In this experiment, researchers propose the use of RFID tags in a semi-dynamic commercial environment to provide concrete landmarks for localization and mapping in pursuit of increased locational certainty. With this obtained, the ultimate goal of the research is to construct a robotics platform for …

Autonomous Space Surveillance For Arbitrary Domains, David Zuehlke

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Space is becoming increasingly congested every day and the task of accurately tracking satellites is paramount for the continued safe operation of both manned and unmanned space missions. In addition to new spacecraft launches, satellite break-up events and collisions generate large amounts of orbital debris dramatically increasing the number of orbiting objects with each such event. In order to prevent collisions and protect both life and property in orbit, accurate knowledge of the position of orbiting objects is necessary. Space Domain Awareness (SDA) used interchangeably with Space Situational Awareness (SSA), are the names given to the daunting task of tracking …

Vision Controlled Autonomous Stakebot For Driving Stakes And Its Digital-Twin, Corey Lee Leydig

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis a novel vision-based AI driven autonomous ‘StakeBot’ is proposed to serve the agricultural 4.0 industries of the future. In recent years supply, demand and production of vegetables that are harvested from plants with weak stems like bell pepper, tomato, eggplant has been significantly up by several fold. With growing demand and new green-house establishments across the country production of vegetables will require a tremendous number of labors which will be hard to supply soon. To overcome the issues in addition to the labor shortages, automation through robotics will be the only viable solution. Plants like bell peppers …

Autonomous 3d Urban And Complex Terrain Geometry Generation And Micro-Climate Modelling Using Cfd And Deep Learning, Tewodros F. Alemayehu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Sustainable building design requires a clear understanding and realistic modelling of the complex interaction between climate and built environment to create safe and comfortable outdoor and indoor spaces. This necessitates unprecedented urban climate modelling at high temporal and spatial resolution. The interaction between complex urban geometries and the microclimate is characterized by complex transport mechanisms. The challenge to generate geometric and physics boundary conditions in an automated manner is hindering the progress of computational methods in urban design. Thus, the challenge of modelling realistic and pragmatic numerical urban micro-climate for wind engineering, environmental, and building energy simulation applications should address …

Northrop Grumman Collaboration Project, Nikkia Rae Psomas-Sheridan, Santiago Robles, Ben Elkayam, Benjamin Ulfhake

Mechanical Engineering

The Northrop Grumman Collaboration Project (NGCP) is a collaborative club project sponsored by Northrop Grumman for the students of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (CPSLO) and Cal Poly Pomona (CPP) to create a fleet of vehicles to aid in the simulated rescue of stranded hiker. The CPSLO club is responsible for delivering an autonomous flight vehicle that can suppress a fire and retrieve a payload. Mechanical Design Team of the CPSLO team was responsible for the design of the frame, electronics housing, and payload and fire suppression systems.

Framework For Data Acquisition And Fusion Of Camera And Radar For Autonomous Vehicle Systems, Clay Edward Vincent

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The primary contribution is the development of the data collection testing methodology for autonomous driving systems of a hybrid electric passenger vehicle. As automotive manufacturers begin to develop adaptive cruise control technology in vehicles, progress is being made toward the development of fully-autonomous vehicles. Adaptive cruise control capability is classified into five levels defined by the Society of Automotive Engineering. Some vehicles under development have attained higher levels of autonomy, but the focus of most commercial development is Level 2 autonomy. As the level of autonomy increases, the sensor technology becomes more advanced with a sensor suite which includes radar, …

Intelligent Autonomous Inspections Using Deep Learning And Detection Markers, Alejandro Martinez Acosta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Inspection of industrial and scientific facilities is a crucial task that must be performed regularly. These inspections tasks ensure that the facilityâ??s structure is in safe operational conditions for humans. Furthermore,the safe operation of industrial machinery, is dependent on the conditions of the environment. For safety reasons, inspections for both structural integrity and equipment is often manually performed by operators or technicians. Naturally, this is often a tedious and laborious task. Additionally, buildings and structures frequently contain hard to reach or dangerous areas, which leads to the harm, injury or death of humans. Autonomous robotic systems offer an attractive solution …

An Unmanned Surface Vehicle: Autonomous Sensor Integration System For Bathymetric Surveys, Fernando Sotelo Torres

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) have been applied to earth sciences, with only a few studies conducted in water environments, as these systems provide autonomous measurement capabilities and transferability to other environmental settings. In this thesis, a reliable, yet economical, USV has been developed for bathymetric surveying of lakes. The system combines an autonomous navigation framework, environmental sensors and a multibeam echosounder to collect submerged topography, temperature, windspeed and monitor the vehicle status during prescribed path planning missions.

The main objective of this study is to provide a methodological framework to build a USV, with independent decision-making, efficient control, and long-range …

Characterization Of 3d Stereolithography (Sla) Printed Polymer For Autonomous-Flow Microfluidic Devices, Michelle Gamboa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

3D Stereolithography (SLA) printing is a high-throughput, precise and reproducible manufacturing platform which makes it a desirable technique to develop microfluidic devices for bioanalytical applications. However, limited information exists regarding the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the polymer resins used in 3D SLA printing. This project demonstrates the characterization of a commercially available 3D SLA printed resin polymer used to develop an autonomous-flow (self-driven) microfluidic device. In this investigation, time-dependent materials characterization was done on the Formlabs clear V4 resin to observe changes in mechanical and surface properties. The clear, printed polymer was analyzed with attenuated total reflectance (ATR), …

Deep Ocean Vehicle (Dov) Scientific Payload, Nichole "Nikki" T. Arm, Mason Gariepy, Brianna Roberts, Kyle C. Walsh

General Engineering

This report aims to provide technical insight into the Deep Ocean Vehicle project performed by the Barrel Eye Explorers. The project was a part of the 2021-2022 Interdisciplinary Senior Project class at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The team consisted of Nikki Arm, Mason Gariepy, Brianna Roberts, and Kyle Walsh who were engineering students in the Mechanical, Materials, General, and Industrial engineering departments, respectively. This project was sponsored by Dr. Crow White and overseen by Karla Carichner. The project was a continuation of Nikki Arm’s internship with Global Ocean Design during the Summer of 2021. The lander, Deep …

B.A.C.O.N. (Battery-Powered Autonomous Cart Conversion) Autonomous Vehicle Design, Robyn C. Ribet, Damond Li, Tanner Hillman, Christopher Or

Mechanical Engineering

The goal of our project is to convert an electric go cart into an autonomous testing platform. We must enable autonomous braking, steering, and acceleration with electro-mechanical systems. We began the project with ideation to create our initial design and have since received ample feedback from faculty, students, and our sponsor. With this feedback we were able to refine our preliminary ideas and produce a detailed design supported with ample analysis, research, and external advice. We have developed our project in four main subsystems: Steering, braking, acceleration, and emergency braking. Following, we procured, manufactured, and assembled all of our designed …

Autonomous Navigator Mobile Robot Upgrade, David Sansoucy

Thinking Matters Symposium

The mobile robot platform has been developed over the course of 10 years at USM. In Spring 2020, Belle-Isle and Werner updated the previous framework by rewriting the software to use the ROS framework running on an on-board Raspberry Pi 3. They also implemented navigation using an A* motion planning algorithm and image processing. In Summer 2021, Ames incorporated Lidar and Kinect sensors onto the robot to improve its real-time navigation capabilities. He also made improvements to the power distribution systems. This project aimed to build on the ROS frameworks developed by the previous 2 teams with the main goal …

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. This report …

Smart Uv-C Disinfectant Module, Nicole Baldy, Luke Rogers, Haitham Saleh

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Smart UV Disinfectant device shall sanitize objects which are 18”x14”x8” or smaller and less than 20 lbs. using UV-C light. This device should contain many safety measures to prevent human and animal exposure to the UV-C light and have no public touchpoints to operate the interface. In order to achieve the first objective, this device shall contain a "sanitizing chamber" which completely encloses the object to be sanitized to prevent outside exposure with detection of any lifeforms inside of the chamber; for the second objective, it will contain a wireless interface to an Android application which can be used …

Autonomous Payload Design With Systems Engineering, Michael Downs, Christopher James Liebhart 2nd

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The design will be an autonomous payload consisting of auto deployment of a drone running an autonomous mission of mapping the terrain around a grounded rocket. The project is part of the Akronauts payload project for the 2022 Spaceport competition. It will include the development of a ground station for monitoring and controlling the drone and the transfer of live data to the station and a computer on board the rocket. The project will aim to use system engineering techniques to accomplish this in the hope of providing documentation and thus insight into the best way to develop a multi-disciplinary …

Garden Bot: Autonomous Home Garden Weed Removal Robot, Brendon Lovejoy, Robert Connolly, Isaac Lucas, Stevan Veselinov

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

With frequent weeding being a tedious chore and an essential task for a successful garden, there is need for an automated method of handling this routine. Existing technologies utilize computer vision, GPS, multiple units and other tools to remove weeds from garden plots. However, these solutions are often complex and expensive, suited for large agricultural plots in contrast to small-scale home gardens. In addition, many of these technologies, along with manual tillers and cultivators suited for home use, are unable to perform weeding within rows of crops in a process known as intra-row weeding. The Garden Bot is an autonomous, …

Communications, Decision-Making, And Interactions Of A Multi-Agent Autonomous Vehicle System, Daniel Davis Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Autonomous vehicles are becoming ever more common and offer many attractive benefits to society. They can operate for long periods of time unattended, operate in environments that may be dangerous to humans, perform time consuming or repetitive tasks and all with greater efficiency and lower costs than humans. For these vehicles to be able to do these things, algorithms need to be designed and optimized that allow them to interact with the real-world environment in safe, effective, and efficient ways.

We designed and built a set of three homogeneous water-based autonomous surface vehicles equipped with appropriate sensors and communications ability …

Lessons To Be Learned In Adoption Of Autonomous Equipment For Field Crops, James Lowenberg-Deboer, Karl Behrendt, Melf-Hinrich Ehlers, Carl R. Dillon, Andreas Gabriel, Iona Yuelu Huang, Ian Kumwenda, Tyler Mark, Andreas Meyer-Aurich, Gabor Milics, Kehinde Oluseyi Olagunju, Søren Marcus Pedersen, Jordan M. Shockley, David Rose

Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Autonomous equipment for crop production is on the verge of technical and economic feasibility, but government regulation may slow its adoption. Key regulatory issues include requirements for on-site human supervision, liability for autonomous machine error, and intellectual property in robotic learning. As an example of the impact of regulation on the economic benefits of autonomous crop equipment, analysis from the United Kingdom suggests that requiring 100% on-site human supervision almost wipes out the economic benefits of autonomous crop equipment for small and medium farms and increases the economies-of-scale advantage of larger farms.

Extracting Microplastic From Anhydrous Beach Sediment Utilizing Relative Terminal Velocities, Grace Robertson, Jackson Schuler

Student Works

The primary intent of this research was to investigate and develop a method to extract microplastics from anhydrous beach sediment. Microplastic is found abundantly in coastal sea environments, including aqueous bottom sediment, and beach sediment (Sagawa, Kawaai, & Hinata, 2018). The scope of the microplastic extraction method in this case is limited to strictly the anhydrous beach sediment. The Venturi Effect and Burnoulli’s Principle have been utilized in the design of a nozzle with airflow that has been injected with a sediment and microplastic heterogenous mixture. A nozzle was designed to operate at the specific terminal velocity of sediment such …

Autonomous Navigation Of The Surface Autonomous Vehicle For Emergency Rescue (Saver), Andrew Skow

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Once dropped into the ocean, SAVER will autonomously navigate towards the Advanced Next-Generation Emergency Locator beacon, worn by every NASA astronaut, that emits a 121.5 MHz distress signal. Using a rotating directional loop antenna SAVER is able to detect and identify the direction of the distress beacon and navigate itself towards the signal source. The autonomous navigation system is dependent on several electrical, and mechanical systems to function properly and presents a novel systems engineering problem. Given testing limitations, NASA requires that SAVER is designed to operate indoors and with an umbilical power supply. The radio direction finding (RDF) system …

Saver (Surface Autonomous Vehicle For Emergency Rescue), Tyler Jorgensen, Ethan Miller, Josephine Isaacson, Joshua Hoye

Mechanical Engineering

This document serves to introduce the design team and their competition challenge, as well as to detail the results of the project. The original design challenge was the NASA Micro-g NExT’s SAVER (Surface Autonomous Vehicle for Emergency Rescue) competition; we were tasked with developing a self-driving water vehicle capable of delivering supplies to Orion astronauts separated from the rest of their crew in the case of a maritime emergency. However, we were not selected to go forward in this competition and thus we decided to scale down the size of the SAVER device to shift the focus of the project …

Autonomous Tennis Ball Collector, Frances Erin Belcher, Michael Wai-Chun Yiu, Matthew David Hoffman, Alex Boyko Petrov, Robert E. Luttrell

Mechanical Engineering

Practicing tennis often involves hitting many tennis balls from one side of the court to the other without an opponent to hit the balls back. In training sessions like these, the task of collecting the balls is laborious when performed manually. The objective of this project is to develop a robotic tennis ball collector that can automatically collect the balls from one side of the court so that the player can rest rather than collect the balls manually. This document outlines the process of designing such a robot. Included in this report is background research, prototype, and concept modeling, along …

Simplification Of Robotics Through Autonomous Navigation, Grant Turner

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

With self-driving vehicles, college campus food delivery, or even automated home vacuuming systems, robotics is undoubtedly becoming more prevalent in everyday society and it can be expected to continue with time. While many people are owners, users, or even just spectators of theses robotic products or services, there seems to be a negative perception of robotics that poses an intimidation factor regarding the attempt to understand the ideas driving technology. This perception tends to view robotics as machines that require rich education to understand the complexity and interworkings of, thus attempts understand the field are neglected.

To combat this line …

Application Of Autonomous Equipment In Heavy Civil Construction, Roman J. Ruffino

Construction Management

The prevalence of autonomous vehicles in our everyday lives is continually growing. Automobile manufacturers such as Tesla have made great strides in building a car that can safely navigate the world around it and respond to sudden changes. There is great potential in the heavy civil construction industry for equipment such as bulldozers, scrapers, and transport vehicles to add another level of safety and efficiency to the worksite. The goal of this research will be to determine whether a contractor would actually apply this technology, or if it isn’t practical for everyday use. This paper will examine the current state …

Design Of A Robotic Inspection Platform For Structural Health Monitoring, Jason R. Soto

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Actively monitoring infrastructure is key to detecting and correcting problems before they become costly. The vast scale of modern infrastructure poses a challenge to monitoring due to insufficient personnel. Certain structures, such as refineries, pose additional challenges and can be expensive, time-consuming, and hazardous to inspect.

This thesis outlines the development of an autonomous robot for structural-health-monitoring. The robot is capable of operating autonomously in level indoor environments and can be controlled manually to traverse difficult terrain. Both visual and lidar SLAM, along with a procedural-mapping technique, allow the robot to capture colored-point-clouds.

The robot is successfully able to automate …

Autonomous Butter Robot, David Chau, Michael Hegglin

Computer Engineering

Don’t you wish your butter would come to you? Well now it can with the patented Michael and David butter robot! Based on an idea from a TV show, our team set out to see if a similar robot was possible to make in real life. The objective was simple. Can we make a small table sized robot that can bring a person butter using image detection software? With that question in mind we set out buying our components. We wanted to keep it small, so we looked up devices that could do simple image processing and from there we …