Engineering Commons^™

Cal Poly Table Top, Kelsey M. Ishimatsu Jacobson, Andrew J. Whitney

Mechanical Engineering

Since many tables currently used at Cal Poly are not ideal for active design situations, we have designed, built and tested to be used in design classrooms with an emphasis on using the tables to quickly prototype ideas. This table is a standing height table in a trapezoidal shape which can comfortably seat four people. The modular design of the table allows multiple tables to be use to create different shapes so that the tables can be used in multiple ways.

Feedforward Chemical Neural Network: An In Silico Chemical System That Learns Xor, Drew Blount, Peter Banda, Christof Teuscher, Darko Stefanovic

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Inspired by natural biochemicals that perform complex information processing within living cells, we design and simulate a chemically implemented feedforward neural network, which learns by a novel chemical-reaction-based analogue of backpropagation. Our network is implemented in a simulated chemical system, where individual neurons are separated from each other by semipermeable cell-like membranes. Our compartmentalized, modular design allows a variety of network topologies to be constructed from the same building blocks. This brings us towards general-purpose, adaptive learning in chemico: wet machine learning in an embodied dynamical system.

Iota: Internet Of Things Assistant, Brandon M. Okumura

Master's Theses

The Internet of Things is the networking of electronic devices, or “Things”, that enables them to collect and share data, as well as interact with their physical surround- ings. Analyzing this collected data allows us to make smarter economic decisions. These interconnected networks are usually driven by low-powered micro-controllers or cheap CPUs that are designed to function optimally with very little hardware. As scale and computational requirements increase, these micro-controllers are unable to grow without being physically replaced.

This thesis proposes a system, IoTA, that assists the Internet of Things by pro- viding a shared computational resource for endpoint devices. …

Creating An Experimental Learning And Research Driven Spacesuit Lab For Erau, Ryan L. Kobrick, Erik Seedhouse

Publications

This paper evaluates key functional data parameters that must be considered for suborbital spaceflight participants wearing pressurized suits for intravehicular activity (IVA). Data parameters of an analog spacesuit worn in an analog flight environment were obtained from 40 civilian participants using the Suborbital Space Flight Simulator (SSFS) at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) while donning Final Frontier Design’s (FFD) fully pressurized third-generation spacesuit as part of their training for Project PoSSUM (the Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere Project). The physiological data collected included: blood pressure, electrocardiograms, heart rate, grip strength, and skin temperature. These parameters were measured using a …

Suitability Testing For Possum Scientist-Astronaut Candidates Using The Suborbital Space Flight Simulator With An Iva Spacesuit, Pedro J. Llanos, Victor Kitmanyen, Erik Seedhouse, Ryan L. Kobrick

Publications

This paper evaluates key functional data parameters that must be considered for suborbital spaceflight participants wearing pressurized suits for intravehicular activity (IVA). Data parameters of an analog spacesuit worn in an analog flight environment were obtained from 40 civilian participants using the Suborbital Space Flight Simulator (SSFS) at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) while donning Final Frontier Design’s (FFD) fully pressurized third-generation spacesuit as part of their training for Project PoSSUM (the Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere Project). The physiological data collected included: blood pressure, electrocardiograms, heart rate, grip strength, and skin temperature. These parameters were measured using a …

Mapping Of Iva Spacesuit Mobility: Design Observations And Functionality, Gavin C. James, Ryan L. Kobrick, Victor Kitmanyen

Publications

The SUIT Lab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is a joint student-faculty project utilizing multiple high altitude pressure garments to investigate suited crew capabilities within a spacecraft during simulated spaceflight missions. The testing environment within the SUIT lab includes the use of suits in a lowfidelity capsule cabin mockup with a horizontally situated launch-positioned chair simulator. Standard videography and analytical video software are used to determine levels of achievement in ergonomic range of motion and comfort design across multiple spacesuits. Comparative analysis and testing provide data supporting the requirement for the use of particular spacesuits inside proposed commercial launch vehicles. Results …

Time Optimal State Feedback Control With Application To A Spacecraft With Cold Gas Propulsion, Samuel J. Kitchen-Mckinley, Sergey V. Drakunov

Publications

A cold gas propulsion system is well suited to provide the required thrust for a small surveyor spacecraft operated near an asteroid or planetary surface. The cold gas propellant can obtained in-situ from local surface or atmospheric constituents. For small spacecraft, the cold gas system may be limited to only on-off control of the main tank where the generated thrust is directly dependent on the tank pressure. As such the thrust will slowly decrease as the propellant is expended. A state feedback, time optimal, control law is developed for a vehicle with propellant is expended. A state feedback, time optimal, …

Inter-Joint Coordination Deficits Revealed In The Decomposition Of Endpoint Jerk During Goal-Directed Arm Movement After Stroke, Jozsef Laczko, Robert A. Scheidt, Lucia Simo, Davide Piovesan

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

It is well documented that neurological deficits after stroke can disrupt motor control processes that affect the smoothness of reaching movements. The smoothness of hand trajectories during multi-joint reaching depends on shoulder and elbow joint angular velocities and their successive derivatives as well as on the instantaneous arm configuration and its rate of change. Right-handed survivors of unilateral hemiparetic stroke and neurologically-intact control participants held the handle of a two-joint robot and made horizontal planar reaching movements. We decomposed endpoint jerk into components related to shoulder and elbow joint angular velocity, acceleration, and jerk. We observed an abnormal decomposition pattern …

Motion Planning For Simple Two-Wheeled Robots, Ronald I. Greenberg, Jeffery M. Karp

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper considers various simple ways of navigating in a 2-dimensianal territory with a two-wheeled robot of a type typical in educational robotics. We determine shortest paths under various modes of operation and compare.

Full-Scale Testing Of Blast-Induced Liquefaction Downdrag On Driven Piles In Sand, Luke Ian Kevan

Theses and Dissertations

Deep foundations such as driven piles are often used to bypass liquefiable layers of soil and bear on more competent strata. When liquefaction occurs, the skin friction around the deep foundation goes to zero in the liquefiable layer. As the pore pressures dissipate, the soil settles. As the soil settles, negative skin friction develops owing to the downward movement of the soil surrounding the pile. To investigate the magnitude of the skin friction along the shaft three driven piles, an H-pile, a closed end pipe pile, and a concrete square pile, were instrumented and used to measure soil induced load …

Broadening Understanding Of Roundabout Operation Analysis: Planning-Level Tools And Signal Application, Ahmed Buasali

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In United States, roundabouts have recently emerged as an effective and efficient alternative to conventional signalized intersections for the control of traffic at junctions. This thesis includes two investigations related to the operations of roundabouts.

The first investigation examines the ability of a planning-level tool (the critical sum method) to serve as an indicator variable for the results of the Highway Capacity Manual’s average delay per vehicle measure for a roundabout facility; to what extent do the results of one predict the results of the other? The critical sum method was found to accurately predict the HCM average delay per …

Benchmarking The Energy Intensity Of Small Nebraska Wastewater Treatment Plants, Steven M. Hanna

Department of Environmental Engineering: Theses and Other Student Research

To help small communities improve the energy efficiency of their wastewater treatment plants, this study created energy benchmarking models for small wastewater plants serving populations of 10,000 or less and having average flows less than 1.5 million gallons per day (MGD). The purpose of these models is to allow comparisons among plants of similar type and size, identify what factors most significantly impact energy usage, and predict potential savings from changes in key plant characteristics.

Energy usage and plant data from 83 small, mechanical wastewater plants in Nebraska were collected and used to create energy benchmarking models. Data obtained from …

Application Of Dfx Methods To A Gait Rehabilitation System, Devin K. Elley

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Walking is an important physical activity that offers major health benefits for those who are able to perform the task. However, there are millions of people worldwide who have lost the ability to walk from physical accidents or a disease which limits the ability for them to use their legs. Often these patients use gait therapy to learn how to walk again. During this gait therapy, a physical therapist may use gait rehabilitation machines to assist the patient in learning to walk in a correct gait path.

Two gait rehabilitation machine iterations were designed to produce an effective rehabilitation machine …

Continuous Electrospinning Prototype Development For Spider Silk, Justin A. Jones

Funded Research Records

No abstract provided.

Effect Of Glass Fiber Length And Content On Mechanical Properties Of Polybutylene Terephthalate, P Threepopnatkul, N Sukprasurt, W Prom-Oh, C Kulsetthanchalee

Journal of Metals, Materials and Minerals

The effect of glass fiber (GF) length and content were studied on mechanical properties of polybutylene terephthalate (PBT). The glass fiber was found to be highly compatible with PBT. The PBT/6 mm GF 30% composite possessed the highest flexural modulus (FM) and flexural strength (FS). The FM and FS were increased with the increasing of GF content. The longer glass fiber resulted in the higher value of FM and FS but hardly affected on the deflection and unnotched izod impact strength of the composites. The impact strength of composites was drastically decreased with the addition of glass fiber as compared …

Six Degrees Of Freedom From Six Degrees Of Separation: The History Of Flight Simulators, David Keck, Morgan Lopez

Publications

Some of today's advanced flight simulators have the capacity to provide pilots with experiences of six degrees of freedom: forward/backward, up/down, or left/right (or pitching, rolling, or yawing in either direction). These incredible devices are the product of over 100 years of design developments that come from a series of technological discoveries and historical events.

Vivado Design Interface: Enabling Cad-Tool Design For Next Generation Xilinx Fpga Devices, Thomas James Townsend

Theses and Dissertations

The popularity of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) has grown in recent years due to their potential performance advantages over sequential software, and as a prototyping platform for application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). Vendors such as Xilinx offer automated tool suites that can be used to program FPGAs based on a RTL description. These tool suites are sufficient forgeneral users, but they usually don't provide the opportunity to integrate custom computer-aideddesign (CAD) tools into the regular design flow. Xilinx first offered this capability in their ISE tool suite with the Xilinx Design Language (XDL). Using XDL, a Xilinx design could be extracted …

Road Accidents Bigdata Mining And Visualization Using Support Vector Machines, Usha Lokala, Srinivas Nowduri, Prabhakar K Sharma

Publications

Useful information has been extracted from the road accident data in United Kingdom (UK), using data analytics method, for avoiding possible accidents in rural and urban areas. This analysis make use of several methodologies such as data integration, support vector machines (SVM), correlation machines and multinomial goodness. The entire datasets have been imported from the traffic department of UK with due permission. The information extracted from these huge datasets forms a basis for several predictions, which in turn avoid unnecessary memory lapses. Since data is expected to grow continuously over a period of time, this work primarily proposes a new …

A Unified Framework For Vehicle Rerouting And Traffic Light Control To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Zhiguang Cao, Siwei Jiang, Jie Zhang, Hongliang Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the number of vehicles grows rapidly each year, more and more traffic congestion occurs, becoming a big issue for civil engineers in almost all metropolitan cities. In this paper, we propose a novel pheromone-based traffic management framework for reducing traffic congestion, which unifies the strategies of both dynamic vehicle rerouting and traffic light control. Specifically, each vehicle, represented as an agent, deposits digital pheromones over its route, while roadside infrastructure agents collect the pheromones and fuse them to evaluate real-time traffic conditions as well as to predict expected road congestion levels in near future. Once road congestion is predicted, …

Urban And Building Multiscale Co-Simulation: Case Study Implementations On Two University Campuses, Clayton Miller, Daren Thomas, Jerome Kampf, Arno Schlueter

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

The co-simulation of both urban and building-level models leverages the advantages of both platforms. It better accounts for the localized effects of surrounding buildings, geography and climate conditions while maintaining high-fidelity building systems representation. This paper describes the co-simulation process of the building and urban-scale models of two university campuses in Switzerland using EnergyPlus and CitySim. In the first case study, on-site measured performance data is compared to the co-simulation results. The second case study examines the results of the two engines. The results show that coupling of EnergyPlus with CitySim resulted in a −15.5\% and −7.5\% impact on cooling …

Discovering Newsworthy Themes From Sequenced Data: A Step Towards Computational Journalism, Qi Fan, Yuchen Li, Dongxiang Zhang, Kian-Lee Tan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic discovery of newsworthy themes from sequenced data can relieve journalists from manually poring over a large amount of data in order to find interesting news. In this paper, we propose a novel k -Sketch query that aims to find k striking streaks to best summarize a subject. Our scoring function takes into account streak strikingness and streak coverage at the same time. We study the k -Sketch query processing in both offline and online scenarios, and propose various streak-level pruning techniques to find striking candidates. Among those candidates, we then develop approximate methods to discover the k most representative …

Attribute-Based Encryption With Expressive And Authorized Keyword Search, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Joseph K. Liu, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To protect data security and privacy in cloud storage systems, a common solution is to outsource data in encrypted forms so that the data will remain secure and private even if storage systems are compromised. The encrypted data, however, must be pliable to search and access control. In this paper, we introduce a notion of attribute-based encryption with expressive and authorized keyword search (ABE-EAKS) to support both expressive keyword search and fine-grained access control over encrypted data in the cloud. In ABE-EAKS, every data user is associated with a set of attributes and is issued a private attribute-key corresponding to …

Mining Capstone Project Wikis For Knowledge Discovery, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Melvrivk Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wikis are widely used collaborative environments as sources of information and knowledge. The facilitate students to engage in collaboration and share information among members and enable collaborative learning. In particular, Wikis play an important role in capstone projects. Wikis aid in various project related tasks and aid to organize information and share. Mining project Wikis is critical to understand the students learning and latest trends in industry. Mining Wikis is useful to educationists and academicians for decision-making about how to modify the educational environment to improve student's learning. The main challenge is that the content or data in project Wikis …

Efficient Algorithms For Solving Size-Shape-Topology Truss Optimization And Shortest Path Problems, Gelareh B. Sanjabi

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Efficient numerical algorithms for solving structural and Shortest Path (SP) problems are proposed and explained in this study. A variant of the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm for optimal (minimum) design of 2-D and 3-D truss structures is proposed. This proposed DE algorithm can handle size-shape-topology structural optimization. The design variables can be mixed continuous, integer/or discrete values. Constraints are nodal displacement, element stresses and buckling limitations.

For dynamic (time dependent) networks, two additional algorithms are also proposed in this study. A heuristic algorithm to find the departure time (at a specified source node) for a given (or specified) arrival time …

Diversity Team Building: Impact On Virtual Team Performance, Nina C. Magpili-Smith

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Although organizations have addressed diversity issues at the organizational-level with resulting positive employee outcomes, lack of scholarly attention to team-level interventions remain. Team-level interventions would benefit organizations more directly as they address issues directly related to task accomplishment. Since diversity may lead to negative performance results for teams, a team building intervention based on the latest empirical research was developed and tested to address the potential performance losses associated to diversity in decision-making teams. The team building intervention provides six crucial elements, namely (1) direct experience of how deep-level team diversity affect team dynamics, (2) diversity education, (3) cultivation of …

Task Assignment And Path Planning For Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Using 3d Dubins Curves, Wenyu Cai, Meiyan Zhang, Y. Rosa Zheng

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper investigates the task assignment and path planning problem for multiple AUVs in three dimensional (3D) underwater wireless sensor networks where nonholonomic motion constraints of underwater AUVs in 3D space are considered. The multi-target task assignment and path planning problem is modeled by the Multiple Traveling Sales Person (MTSP) problem and the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to solve the MTSP problem with Euclidean distance as the cost function and the Tour Hop Balance (THB) or Tour Length Balance (TLB) constraints as the stop criterion. The resulting tour sequences are mapped to 2D Dubins curves in the X − …

Multi-View Face Recognition From Single Rgbd Models Of The Faces, Donghun Kim, Bharath Comandur, Henry P. Medeiros, Noha M. Elfiky, Avinash Kak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

This work takes important steps towards solving the following problem of current interest: Assuming that each individual in a population can be modeled by a single frontal RGBD face image, is it possible to carry out face recognition for such a population using multiple 2D images captured from arbitrary viewpoints? Although the general problem as stated above is extremely challenging, it encompasses subproblems that can be addressed today. The subproblems addressed in this work relate to: (1) Generating a large set of viewpoint dependent face images from a single RGBD frontal image for each individual; (2) using hierarchical approaches based …

Modeling Micro-Porous Surfaces For Secondary Electron Emission Control To Suppress Multipactor, J. M. Sattler, Ronald A. Coutu Jr., R. Lake, T. Laurvick, T. Back, S. Fairchild

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

This work seeks to understand how the topography of a surface can be engineered to control secondary electron emission (SEE) for multipactor suppression. Two unique, semi-empirical models for the secondary electron yield (SEY) of a micro-porous surface are derived and compared. The first model is based on a two-dimensional (2D) pore geometry. The second model is based on a three-dimensional (3D) pore geometry. The SEY of both models is shown to depend on two categories of surface parameters: chemistry and topography. An important parameter in these models is the probability of electron emissions to escape the surface pores. This probability …

Development Of The Compact Jet Engine Simulator From Concept To Useful Test Rig, Henry H. Haskin

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

NASA had a goal to develop a set of modeling tools for designing next generation civil transport aircraft with reduced noise, emissions and increased fuel efficiency by 2016. To verify the models, a database of aerodynamic and acoustic data was needed for an unconventional flying wing design that was predicted to meet the goals. A Compact Jet Engine Simulator (CJES) was needed as the jet source for the 5.8% scale model. Ultra-Compact Combustor Technology from the Air Force Research Laboratory was used to reduce the conventional burner acoustic test rigs down to the required scale size. The Air Force design …

Performance Resilience Analysis Of Dynamic Feedback Controllers For Both Multiplicative And Additive Gain Perturbations, Fan Feng, Susan C. Schneider, Edwin E. Yaz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

In this work, a procedure is presented for performance resilience analysis of continuous-time systems controlled by full-order dynamic feedback compensators. The resilience property is defined in terms of defining maximum perturbations on both the controller and observer gains that will maintain controller and observer eigenvalues in disjoint regions in the complex plane so that the closed loop system will sustain certain performance characteristics. The desired performance is characterized by the response speed and magnitude bounds on the response. Therefore, the intersection of two regions are chosen, vertical strips and sector regions, to guarantee upper and lower bounds on the settling …