Computer Engineering Commons^™

Short Run Box Maker, Jesus Valdez-Ruelas

General Engineering

Small businesses with short run product catalogs have trouble finding the right size box that will work for multiple products. In turn, this leads most businesses to use oversized boxes resulting in unnecessary shipping fees. The objective of this project was to develop and test a cost-effective prototype of a box making machine that could create a short run of custom sized boxes. A Co2 laser was found to be the best option for cutting cardboard and a vertically standing machine was designed to feed the cardboard via rollers. To control cardboard movement stepper motors were used and controlled using …

Otter Vector Extension, Alexis A. Peralta

Computer Engineering

This paper offers an implementation of a subset of the "RISC-V 'V' Vector Extension", v0.7.x. The "RISC-V 'V' Vector Extension" is the proposed vector instruction set for RISC-V open-source architecture. Vectors are inherently data-parallel, allowing for significant performance increases. Vectors have applications in fields such as cryptography, graphics, and machine learning. A vector processing unit was added to Cal Poly's RISC-V multi-cycle architecture, known as the OTTER. Computationally intensive programs running on the OTTER Vector Extension ran over three times faster when compared to the baseline multi-cycle implementation. Memory intensive applications saw similar performance increases.

Fitness Plug, Evan Lee Ashley

Computer Engineering

My parents only allowed me to play videogames or watch television for a certain number of minutes or hours per day. By limiting screen time, they encouraged me to be active and find other things to do outside of television or videogames. The Fitness Plug aims to do both by converting time exercised to entertainment time; you can only watch television or play videogames for as long as you have exercised.

Flexible Fault Tolerance For The Robot Operating System, Sukhman S. Marok

Master's Theses

The introduction of autonomous vehicles has the potential to reduce the number of accidents and save countless lives. These benefits can only be realized if autonomous vehicles can prove to be safer than human drivers. There is a large amount of active research around developing robust algorithms for all parts of the autonomous vehicle stack including sensing, localization, mapping, perception, prediction, planning, and control. Additionally, some of these research projects have involved the use of the Robot Operating System (ROS). However, another key aspect of realizing an autonomous vehicle is a fault-tolerant design that can ensure the safe operation of …

High Speed, High Current Monitoring System, Nicolette Lila Ray

Electrical Engineering

Electronics testing requires lengthy data collection and analysis. Streamlining at least part of this process allows resource reallocation, and faster data processing. Verifying a signal’s efficiency is key specification for a component’s datasheet. This project focuses on streamlining data collection when measuring a device’s output current. It combines amplifier design and digital interfacing to perform monitor a device’s output current. A computer-enable interface displays a graphical output current representation. It ensures accurate, high speed, high current measurements while removing a person’s need to manually plot data after testing. A new testing method provides room for company and product growth with …

Robust Drone Landing, Alvin Xuan Quan Chui

Computer Engineering

The growth of drone technology goes with the demands of computer vision. Computer vision provides opportunities for developers to design and create, giving rise to a new innovation. It is also a basis for a full autonomous system when implemented with an intelligent agent. Surveillance drones are installed with cameras, and cameras are the most common approach to computer vision. However, a high-resolution camera with great performance could be expensive, while other low-cost cameras might lack reading accuracy. To improve the performances and maximize a camera’s capability, many different object trackers come into play. This paper will investigate and study …

Wine Sampler, Lance L. Litten

Computer Engineering

Quality testing is an important part of the wine industry. Without proper quality control, thousands of dollars could be wasted on bottling and recalling hundreds of gallons of wine. Due to this, labs are set up that collect wine samples from the tanks in a wine production plant and test them. A big part of this testing is determining exactly what tanks need to be tested and what tanks are at risk. My project aims to help automate this task by collecting data from the tanks wirelessly and keeping track of simple indicators such as pH and temperature. Automating this …

Rchex: A Radio-Controlled Hexapod, Dominique Sayo

Computer Engineering

rcHex is a radio-controlled hexapod with 18 degrees of freedom, capable of positional and rotational body adjustment as well as omnidirectional travel at variable speeds using three common gaits. Its general-purpose design accessible to hobbyists makes rcHex an platform for further development, whether it be experimentation in advanced robotic movement or retrofitting sensors to utilize technologies such as computer vision and artificial intelligence. This report explores some of the design intricacies of hexapod movement, including gait sequencing and the application of inverse kinematics to multi-jointed limbs.

Biometric Identification With Ecg Signals, Connor Lindstrom, Jonathan Wood, Jacob Torchia, Jonathan Lee

Electrical Engineering

This project introduces a new form of biometric identification with an ECG signal with the use of machine learning concepts. The ECG signal makes a good candidate for identification because of its unique characteristics that make it easy to distinguish individuals from one another. A patient who has previously had ECG scans stored in a database before, can be verified using this program. This project has the capability of identifying a person or verifying a person solely using their ECG signal. Utilizing this biometric identification, hospitals would be able to add to the reliability of their identification process. Additionally, companies …

Polyone Smartphone, Joshua Zalmanowitz, Chi Nguyen, Gerome Cacho, Chris Lim

Electrical Engineering

The Poly One Smartphone is a student designed smartphone built to explore the implementation of 5G, provide a hardware solution to ensure personal information security and privacy, and provide longer battery life. The key features of this smartphone include but are not limited to a main cpu, some form of network connectivity in the form of Wi-fi or Cellular Data, calling functionality, a rechargeable battery that works with common power connection protocols, and compatibility with popular applications.

Surface Autonomous Vehicle For Emergency Rescue, Max Emerick, Ryan Shields, Christopher Feickert, Raymond Impara

Mechanical Engineering

The goal of this document is to clearly define the problem parameters and project objectives and to clearly describe the design process, planned final design, and manufacturing and testing procedures for the senior design project of Team 26: SAVER -- the Surface Autonomous Vehicle for Emergency Rescue. This is both for the purpose of project planning and for clear communication between all parties involved in the project.

The objective of the SAVER project is to develop a proof of concept for an autonomous maritime search and rescue vehicle for aiding in man-overboard missions. To accomplish this goal, a list of …

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 …

Otter Debugger, Keefe Johnson

Computer Engineering

This project is a debugger and programmer for the OTTER CPU, the implementation of the RISC-V ISA used by Cal Poly to teach computer architecture and assembly language in CPE 233/333 and usually implemented on the Basys3 FPGA development board. With this tool, students can quickly program their OTTER with a new/revised RISC-V program binary without resynthesizing the entire FPGA design. They can then use the debugger from a PC to pause/continue/single-step execution and set breakpoints, while inspecting and modifying register and memory contents. This enables real-time debugging of OTTER projects involving custom hardware such as a keyboard and VGA …

Lawn Buddy, Jayson Johnston, Andrew Brown, Jacob Maljian

Electrical Engineering

Grass lawns are a common hallmark of the American home. In 2019, a survey from the National Association of Landscape Professionals found that 81% of all Americans owned a lawn [1]. Mowing is a time consuming and costly chore that is part of maintaining a grass lawn. The manual labor in mowing a lawn can exceed 40 hours per year [2]. People commonly incur weekly costs on mowing services to save time. Traditional gas powered mowers are physically demanding and use engines that need routine maintenance. They operate loudly enough that users should be wearing hearing protection and the noise …

The Characterization Of Effective Electromagnetic Fields On The Safety And Quality Of Low-Moisture Foods (Effs) - Prototype Device Development, Joe G. Sandoval

Electrical Engineering

Contamination of low-moisture foods including flour, wheat grain, baby formula, and more, have increasingly become a concern due to sanitizing challenges. While industrial food processors have long used RF heating to sanitize mass quantities, an equivalent consumer device is absent from the market today. The Characterization of Effective Electromagnetic Fields on the Safety and Quality of Low-Moisture Foods (EEFS) project is an interdisciplinary effort to develop an RF heating consumer device to sanitize low-moisture foods.

A prototype device was designed to sanitize low-moisture food items using RF heating acceptable for commercial or consumer applications.

Artificial Neural Network To Detect Alzheimer's In Mri Scans, James Alden Poirier, Michael Gary Tuttle

Electrical Engineering

Alzheimer’s Disease ranks (AD) as one of the most common diseases in America. Currently, detecting Alzheimer’s Disease relies upon reported symptoms, however changes in the brain can manifest years or decades before symptoms appear. In recent years, researchers have successfully utilized Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for a variety of image classification tasks. Here, we train an ANN to detect Alzheimer’s Disease using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans. Giving an MRI to both a neural network and a doctor will allow the doctor to be more confident in their answer, as well as double-check their answer with an objective report …

Reading Robot, Gillian Watts, Andrew Myers, Sabrinna Tan, Taylor Klein, Omeed Djassemi

General Engineering

Presently, there is an insufficient availability of human experts to assist students in reading competency and comprehension. Our team’s goal was to create an improved socially assistive robot for use by therapists, teachers, and parents to help children and adults develop reading skills while they do not have access to specialists. HAPI is a socially assistive robot that we created with the goal of helping students practice their reading comprehension skills. HAPI enables a student to improve their reading skills without an educator present, while enabling educators to review the student's performance remotely. Design constraints included: physical size, weight, duration …

Bootstrapping Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, Mitchell Miller

Master's Theses

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) are a prominent genre in today's video game industry with the most popular MMORPGs generating billions of dollars in revenue and attracting millions of players. As they have grown, they have become a major target for both technological research and sociological research. In such research, it is nearly impossible to reach the same player scale from any self-made technology or sociological experiments. This greatly limits the amount of control and topics that can be explored. In an effort to make up a lacking or non-existent player-base for custom-made MMORPG research scenarios A.I. agents, …

Dynamic Procedural Music Generation From Npc Attributes, Megan E. Washburn

Master's Theses

Procedural content generation for video games (PCGG) has seen a steep increase in the past decade, aiming to foster emergent gameplay as well as to address the challenge of producing large amounts of engaging content quickly. Most work in PCGG has been focused on generating art and assets such as levels, textures, and models, or on narrative design to generate storylines and progression paths. Given the difficulty of generating harmonically pleasing and interesting music, procedural music generation for games (PMGG) has not seen as much attention during this time.

Music in video games is essential for establishing developers' intended mood …

Room Management Web Application And Movement And Temperature Sensors, Visalbotr Chan, Huy Anh Duong

Computer Engineering

There are three main parts of this system: micro-controller, database, and website. Micro-controller detects motion of people walking in and out and It also measures room temperature and humidity in a confined space then updates collected data to the database. Our system’s database contains 6 main columns: room number, room capacity, number of students, temperature in Celsius, humidity in percent and date created. Finally, this database is queried by the website to display the information on the webpage. Users could also navigate on our site to check the most and least occupy rooms, and they can also search for a …

Decentralized, Noncooperative Multirobot Path Planning With Sample-Basedplanners, William Le

Master's Theses

In this thesis, the viability of decentralized, noncooperative multi-robot path planning algorithms is tested. Three algorithms based on the Batch Informed Trees (BIT*) algorithm are presented. The first of these algorithms combines Optimal Reciprocal Collision Avoidance (ORCA) with BIT*. The second of these algorithms uses BIT* to create a path which the robots then follow using an artificial potential field (APF) method. The final algorithm is a version of BIT* that supports replanning. While none of these algorithms take advantage of sharing information between the robots, the algorithms are able to guide the robots to their desired goals, with the …

Tiny Disco: A Cost-Effective, High-Fidelity Wireless Audio System, Luke Martin Liberatore

Computer Engineering

The Tiny Disco is a WiFi based concert system, featuring improvements on popular “Silent Disco” concerts. Rather than being tied to compression and bandwidth restrictions present in traditional silent disco systems, the Tiny Disco system can deliver 320kbps+ audio quality, and allows listeners to bring their own headphones, further lending to the high quality audio experience.

Tiny Disco uses a Raspberry Pi as the audio server, and Espressif ESP32 microcontrollers as audio receivers/clients. The Tiny Disco is primarily geared toward smaller concerts and niche events where audio quality is valued, though due to its WiFi-based architecture, it can be expanded …

Opendrop Software Development, Jiajun Guan

Electrical Engineering

To be able to transfer and mix solutions more efficiently and accurately during biology experiments, the Electrical Engineering department at Cal Poly University is planning to purchase or engineer the OpenDrop device. The OpenDrop device uses electro-wetting technology to control the movement of small droplets of water on a planar electrode array to transport and mix different solutions. This device is an open-source project and could be purchased online through the GaudiLab. The basic code of the system could be found in GitHub. With this code as a reference, the goal of this senior project is to develop the firmware, …

Bitcoin Price Prediction Using Neural Networks, Vladislav Killiakov

Electrical Engineering

In this project, I will investigate the performance of several major neural network architectures for the task of Bitcoin price prediction. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that is recently becoming increasingly more popular, and more widely adopted as a financial instrument. As a result, more efforts have been made in the past several years to model and predict its price. However, to this moment a large portion of work on Bitcoin price modeling was done using statistical or classical machine learning techniques. At the same time, other artificial intelligence based prediction techniques, and specifically neural networks, have not been explored to …

Reasoning From Point Clouds, Joey Wilson

Computer Engineering

Over the past two years, 3D object detection has been a major area of focus across industry and academia. This is primarily due to the difficulty of learning data from point clouds. While camera images are fixed size and can therefore be easily trained on using convolution, point clouds are unstructured series of points in three dimensions. Therefore, there is no fixed number of features, or a structure to run convolution on. Instead, researchers have developed many ways of attempting to learn from this data, however there is no clear consensus on what is the best method, as each has …

Mobile Robot Platform, Sukhman S. Marok

Electrical Engineering

The Mobile Robot Platform is a research and development tool designed for researchers working in the field of robotics. The cost of existing mobile robot platforms can easily be in the thousands of dollars, leading many researchers to choose between spending the time to create their own platform or buying an expensive pre-existing solution. The Mobile Robot Platform proposed combines pre-existing open source software and hardware solutions, along with a strong mechanical base that is capable of navigating on flat surfaces. The robot is designed to have many of the necessary components needed for teleoperation as well as autonomous navigation. …

An Application Of Sliding Mode Control To Model-Based Reinforcement Learning, Aaron Thomas Parisi

Master's Theses

The state-of-art model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can generate admissible controls for complicated systems with no prior knowledge of the system dynamics, so long as sufficient (oftentimes millions) of samples are available from the environ- ment. On the other hand, model-based reinforcement learning approaches seek to leverage known optimal or robust control to reinforcement learning tasks by mod- elling the system dynamics and applying well established control algorithms to the system model. Sliding-mode controllers are robust to system disturbance and modelling errors, and have been widely used for high-order nonlinear system control. This thesis studies the application of sliding mode control …

Utilizing Trajectory Optimization In The Training Of Neural Network Controllers, Nicholas Kimball

Master's Theses

Applying reinforcement learning to control systems enables the use of machine learning to develop elegant and efficient control laws. Coupled with the representational power of neural networks, reinforcement learning algorithms can learn complex policies that can be difficult to emulate using traditional control system design approaches. In this thesis, three different model-free reinforcement learning algorithms, including Monte Carlo Control, REINFORCE with baseline, and Guided Policy Search are compared in simulated, continuous action-space environments. The results show that the Guided Policy Search algorithm is able to learn a desired control policy much faster than the other algorithms. In the inverted pendulum …

Dripline: A Distributed Experiment Control System, Eric Gonzalez, Ben Laroque, Noah Oblath

STAR Program Research Presentations

Project 8 is a nuclear physics experiment which seeks to measure the mass of neutrinos. The experiment requires the use of various pieces of hardware which need to be controlled, and from this need, a software system named Dripline is being developed. Because most researchers have some knowledge in Python and it is easier to understand the syntax of Python as opposed to C++, a Python application programming interface (API) is being created to allow any researcher working with Dripline ease of use. As development progresses, features may be added or removed as needed which requires constant testing, debugging, and …

Keylime, Matthew Orgill

Computer Engineering

This project creates an iOS mobile app geared specifically toward the students of California Polytechnic State University. The app aims to provide the ability for users to discover new restaurants to checkout in the central coast area. These restaurants can be filtered to the user’s choosing based on the price of food, rating the restaurant has received, distance away from the user, and type of food. In addition, featured deals that local restaurants currently offer can be found on the app. Each restaurant can be favorited by the user to allow for better filtering of discovering new restaurants and to …