Computer Engineering Commons^™

Towards Autonomous Localization Of An Underwater Drone, Nathan Sfard

Master's Theses

Autonomous vehicle navigation is a complex and challenging task. Land and aerial vehicles often use highly accurate GPS sensors to localize themselves in their environments. These sensors are ineffective in underwater environments due to signal attenuation. Autonomous underwater vehicles utilize one or more of the following approaches for successful localization and navigation: inertial/dead-reckoning, acoustic signals, and geophysical data. This thesis examines autonomous localization in a simulated environment for an OpenROV Underwater Drone using a Kalman Filter. This filter performs state estimation for a dead reckoning system exhibiting an additive error in location measurements. We evaluate the accuracy of this Kalman …

Artificial Neural Network-Based Robotic Control, Justin Ng

Master's Theses

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are highly-capable alternatives to traditional problem solving schemes due to their ability to solve non-linear systems with a nonalgorithmic approach. The applications of ANNs range from process control to pattern recognition and, with increasing importance, robotics. This paper demonstrates continuous control of a robot using the deep deterministic policy gradients (DDPG) algorithm, an actor-critic reinforcement learning strategy, originally conceived by Google DeepMind. After training, the robot performs controlled locomotion within an enclosed area. The paper also details the robot design process and explores the challenges of implementation in a real-time system.

"Dual Peaks" Analog Distortion Guitar Effects Pedal, Dave Raul Breuer

Computer Engineering

The Dual Peaks distortion pedal is an analog effects pedal for electric guitar that distorts and boosts the guitar signal in order to achieve tonal characteristics often heard in music genres such as blues, rock, hard rock, and metal. Dual Peaks aims to remedy the current distortion pedal design, and provide a new spin not often provided in the majority of pedals. Dual Peaks contains two separate distortion channels which provide the player with a vast array of distortion and overdrive tones at the press of a switch. Also, Dual Peaks has a "noise gate" and 3-band equalizer circuits built …

Senior Project - Roborodentia Robot, Nicholas Alexander Ilog

Computer Engineering

This project includes an autonomous robot capable of dispensing balls from a dispenser mounted on a wall and shooting the balls through targets five to eight feet away. The robot can hold up to five balls at a time and shoots balls one by one at targets.

Collision Avoidance Smartphone, Matt Columbres, Aaron Parisi, Joey Schnecker, Luis Wong

Electrical Engineering

There are many instances in day-to-day life where people cannot or would rather not pay full attention to their surroundings. Walking while preoccupied with a smartphone or walking while blind are excellent examples where technology could be used to make the task of avoiding 2collisions reactive, instead of proactive. A device which monitors a user’s surroundings and notifies the user when a potential collision is detected (and, additionally, notifying them as to where the obstacle is with respect to them) could be used to make walking distracted less of a hazard for the user and those around the user and …

Modular Injection System And Sampling Template (M.I.S.S.T) Design Report, Froylan M. Aguirre

Computer Engineering

Digital systems are ubiquitous throughout modern life and their applications continue to grow. Thus system designers engineer and test modular systems to mitigate error rates. Smaller systems and their increasing importance in many applications demand the utmost reliability. Fault injection is the most common method used by researchers and engineers to test system reliability. However, most hardware fault injection implementations are ad hoc and only used to test a specific system or for specific tests. There is also software-implemented fault injection that adds overhead in the benchmark source code. The aim of this project is to develop a general use, …

Smart Speaker Integration With Letshub, Michael Thanh Diep

Computer Engineering

Imagine you are a property manager, and you are currently renting your property to tenants. These tenants, who pay rent continuously for use of the property often leave the burden of upkeep to the property owner (or property manager). If the tenant were to run into an issue with their rental (such as a broken sink, replacement of a faucet, leaking of the roof, … etc.) they would have to coordinate with the property manager, who would then in turn have to manage the logistics of a service contractor and the tenants availability. Eventually, after logistic juggling from the tenant, …

Forumsphere.Com, Nicholas Scott Gatehouse, Sam Robert Rastovich

Computer Science and Software Engineering

We live in the Age of Information & Technology where social media has become an integral part of our society. Social media platforms such as Facebook help bring people and ideas together in one place. However, currently there is no centralized hub on the internet that is geared towards individual college campuses. Our goal is to create an environment that promotes structured and productive discussion between students, alumni, and staff. A platform like ours is needed to bring a campus closer if the community is willing and able to help one another.

There are other platforms that focus on social …

Roborodentia Robot: Treadbot, Stephen C. Schmidt

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This document is a summary of my contest entry to the 2018 Cal Poly Roborodentia competition. It is meant to be a process overview and design outline of the mechanical, electrical, and software components of my robot.

Dynamic Routing And Network Monitoring For The Polywog Protocol, Ryan Lawrence, Josh Pfeffer

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This document analyzes the implementation of dynamic routing for router nodes in a mesh network. It examines the algorithm used to populate both the minimum-distance and the routing tables. Furthermore, it describes the node configurations used for testing and applications for mesh networks.

Additionally, this document describes the implementation and testing of network monitoring in a mesh network. It discusses the steps used to forward active nodes in the network between router nodes, a gateway node, and a network monitor.

Lastly, this paper details our future plans for implementing additional features for a network monitor.

Extension Of Cpe 454 Operating System, Joseph Nathaniel Arhar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project extended on the operating system I wrote in CPE 454 by adding additional features on top of the existing implementation. In order to implement them, I researched operating system design patterns and hardware details. I used wiki.osdev.org for most research, just like I did in CPE 454. The source code for the project is at https://github.com/josepharhar/jos.

Pressure Ulcer Prevention System, Rey-David Palomares, Ojus Rao

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Pressure ulcers, also known as bedsores, are a widespread but often understated problem. A pressure ulcer is an injury that develops with constant pressure on an area of skin for a long time. They range from bruises to open wounds to even exposed bone. These injuries especially impact bedridden and elderly hospital inpatients, since these people must depend on nursing staff for mobility.

Pressure ulcers can seem to be a solved problem. Solutions that completely eliminate pressure ulcers do exist. These solutions, however, are too expensive for widespread use, at thousands of dollars per bed. Other solutions, such as relying …

Dynamic Model For Simulating Motion Of The Right Ventricle, Brian Michael Larsen, Sam Koopman Porter, John Francis D'Ambrosio

Mechanical Engineering

This report documents all the research, ideation, and mockups used to determine right ventricle motion and develop a system capable of reproducing that motion on a tissue sample. The model is intended for evaluating anchoring systems being developed by Edwards Lifesciences for use with tricuspid valve therapies. Several design solutions were considered for the primary functions of recreating motion of the right ventricle and attaching tissue to the device. From these ideas a primary means of producing motion and attaching tissue was selected. These ideas were then developed over the course of a school year to become the final system …

Corridor Navigation For Monocular Vision Mobile Robots, Matthew James Ng

Master's Theses

Monocular vision robots use a single camera to process information about its environment. By analyzing this scene, the robot can determine the best navigation direction. Many modern approaches to robot hallway navigation involve using a plethora of sensors to detect certain features in the environment. This can be laser range finders, inertial measurement units, motor encoders, and cameras.

By combining all these sensors, there is unused data which could be useful for navigation. To draw back and develop a baseline approach, this thesis explores the reliability and capability of solely using a camera for navigation. The basic navigation structure begins …

The Design, Building, And Testing Of A Constant On Discreet Jammer For The Ieee 802.15.4/Zigbee Wireless Communication Protocol, Alexandre J. Marette

Master's Theses

As wireless protocols become easier to implement, more products come with wireless connectivity. This latest push for wireless connectivity has left a gap in the development of the security and the reliability of some protocols. These wireless protocols can be used in the growing field of IoT where wireless sensors are used to share information throughout a network. IoT is being implemented in homes, agriculture, manufactory, and in the medical field. Disrupting a wireless device from proper communication could potentially result in production loss, security issues, and bodily harm. The 802.15.4/ZigBee protocol is used in low power, low data rate, …

Developing, Evaluating, And Demonstrating An Open Source Gateway And Mobile Application For The Smartfarm Decision Support System, Caleb D. Fink

Master's Theses

The purpose of this research is to design, develop, evaluate, and demonstrate an open source gateway and mobile application for the SmartFarm open source decision support system to improve agricultural stewardship, environmental conservation, and provide farmers with a system that they own. There are very limited options for an open source gateway for collecting data on the farm. The options available are: expensive, require professional maintenance, are not portable between systems, improvements are made only by the manufacturer, limited in customization options, difficult to operate, and data is owned by the company rather than the farmer. The gateway is designed …

Multi-Task Learning Framework For Mining Crowd Intelligence Towards Clinical Treatment, Shweta Yadav, Asif Ekbal, Sriparna Saha, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Amit Sheth

Publications

In recent past, social media has emerged as an active platform in the context of healthcare and medicine. In this paper, we present a study where medical user’s opinions on health-related issues are analyzed to capture the medical sentiment at a blog level. The medical sentiments can be studied in various facets such as medical condition, treatment, and medication that characterize the overall health status of the user. Considering these facets, we treat analysis of this information as a multi-task classification problem. In this paper, we adopt a novel adversarial learning approach for our multi-task learning framework to learn the …

Autonomous Navigation And Mapping Using Lidar, Steven E. Alsalamy, Ben C. Foo, Garrett C. Frels

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project was to make a fully autonomous robot, capable of mapping its surroundings and navigating through obstacles. This was done through the use of a chassis fitted with tracks and two motors, a lidar, a compass, and a Raspberry Pi. The robot also contains two batteries and is self powered. Encoders are used on the motors in order to track the distance traveled for more precise mapping and movements.

Darling, Robot For Roborodentia 2018, Michael Le, Steven Liu

Computer Engineering

For our senior project, our group decided to build a robot to participate in Roborodentia 2018, an annual robotics competition overlooked by Professor Seng that takes place during open house. When taking into consideration the classes that Computer Engineering students had to have taken and the skills that we have developed throughout our time here on campus, a robotics project seemed to be an appropriate culmination of both the technical and non-technical skills that we have acquired.

Dynamic Video Streaming For Nano Quadcopters, Shane Daniel Kent, Ryan Weideman, Nicholas Kimball

Computer Engineering

The objective of this project was to develop a system that streams real-time video from a Crazyflie 2.0 nano quadcopter. We discuss the motivation behind the project including applications to swarm robotics and computer vision research. We highlight the initial research and design goals that guided the development of the system such as hardware selection and system specifications. We detail the software and hardware subsystems that we implemented including the video-streaming board, firmware, and video-streaming user application. We examine the performance of the final system and discuss the limitations imposed by the hardware. We conclude by describing future work that …

Arm Mke1xf Mcu Replatform, Nathan Hong, Derek Lung, Japsimran Singh, Bevin Tang

Computer Engineering

After Cal Poly Racing’s electrical team began to hit the technical limits of the ADC and other I/O features of the current 8-bit Atmel AT90 microcontroller unit, it became clear that an upgrade was due. This replatforming project takes the functionalities of the old, 8-bit architecture, and aims to provide a 32-bit version using the ARM MKE1xF MCU. With the idea of having a working PCB as a stretch goal, the scope of the library development was limited to enable base functionality. Thus, the only libraries developed were for the Timer, ADC, SPI, UART, and CAN. Additionally, this document discusses …

Roborodentia, Bryan D. Hendricks

Computer Engineering

This project is an autonomous robot, designed to perform a series of basic tasks without any human input. It’s based on the 2018 Roborodentia competition, in which teams of students design and build a small (roughly 1 square foot) robot that collects small foam spheres from vertical tubes on the edges of a table-sized arena, and shoot them into goals across the field. The more foam spheres the robot makes into the goals after a 3 minute time period, the more points they get. The challenge is doing so autonomously, without any human input after the initial timer for the …

Otd 360 Corsa Plate And Pcb Recreation, Patrick Ryan Malapira

Computer Engineering

Mechanical keyboards have a rich history alongside the development of personal computers with keyboards from leading manufacturers such as IBM and Apple, which are sought after by today’s enthusiast. As the hobby matured and hobbyist began straying from original equipment manufacturer, OEM, mechanical keyboards, enthusiasts sought to create their own keyboards.The custom mechanical keyboard hobby’s origins can be traced back to Korea on an online forum otd.kr. Custom mechanical keyboards has progressed far past the provided OEM solutions focusing on various aspects such as ergonomics, programmability, and portability. In today’s do it yourself, DIY, culture, hobbyists can play a role …

Lionfish Detection System, Carmelo Furlan, Andrew Boniface

Computer Engineering

Deep neural networks have proven to be an effective method in classification of images. The ability to recognize objects has opened the door for many new systems which use image classification to solve challenging problems where conventional image classification would be inadequate. We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to identify lionfish from other species that might be found in the same habitats. Google’s Inception framework served as a powerful platform for our fish recognition system. By using transfer learning, we were able to obtain exceptional results for the classification of different species of fish. The convolutional neural network …

Roborodentia Final Report, Trevor James Gesell, Zeph Colby Nord, Mitchell Tyler Myjak

Computer Engineering

The Senior Project consisted of competing in Roborodentia, a competition in which groups build robots to complete a particular task. This event took place at the Cal Poly Open House on Saturday, April 12th, 2018. For the competition, the robot was to collect Nerf balls from supply tubes raised approximately 7” from the board and shoot them into nets placed along the opposite side of the course. The design, manufacture, and testing of the robot began the first week of Cal Poly winter quarter and lasted until the day of the competition.

Urinalysis Screening For Rural Communities, Dana Bren-Cardali, Lilian Dao, Jeffrey Destruel, Ryan Fernandez

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Access to medical care and health screenings is a necessity for patients around the globe, but it can be difficult to provide this without screenings becoming costly or convoluted. In rural and underdeveloped areas, patients are often disadvantaged when it comes to finding reliable and affordable healthcare. The isolation provided by their location and the rising costs of physicians makes it impossible for most impoverished communities to attain personalized care. Because of this, treatable diseases often go unaddressed, allowing diseases to progress to a critical condition. Mortality rates have shown to be higher in communities located in rural areas and …

The Human Keyboard, Derek Char, Thomas Chung, Alexander Mckee, Allen Pai

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Most products that implement features for user interactions utilize buttons or switches for the user to command to select actions to perform. Such designs are typically controlled with direct motions, such as touch or voice and are seldom designed in consideration of those unable to utilize direct control. In this project, we designed technology that reads naturally occuring biosignals from the body, which then can be apply those signals with any interface. For our specific application in this project, we decided to implement a keyboard. Instead of teaching the fingers how to type on a mechanical keyboard, the body can …

Neural Network On Virtualization System, As A Way To Manage Failure Events Occurrence On Cloud Computing, Khoi Minh Pham

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Cloud computing is one important direction of current advanced technology trends, which is dominating the industry in many aspects. These days Cloud computing has become an intense battlefield of many big technology companies, whoever can win this war can have a very high potential to rule the next generation of technologies. From a technical point of view, Cloud computing is classified into three different categories, each can provide different crucial services to users: Infrastructure (Hardware) as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Normally, the standard measurements for cloud computing reliability level is …

Inter Process Communication Between Two Servers Using Mpich, Nagabhavana Narla

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The main aim of the project is to launch multiple processes and have those processes communicate with each other using peer to peer communication to eliminate the problems of multiple processes running on a single server, and multiple processes running on inhomogeneous servers as well as the problems of scalability. This entire process is done using MPICH which is a high performance and portable implementation of Message Passing Interface standard.

The project involves setting up the passwordless authentication between two local servers with the help of SSH connection. By establishing a peer to peer communication and by using a unique …

Epicconfigurator Computer Configurator And Cms Platform, Ivo A. Tantamango

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Very often when we are looking to buy new IT equipment in an online store, we face the problem that certain parts of our order are not compatible with others or sometimes one part needs additional components. From another point of view in this process, when an online store owner wants to manage the products available in stock, assign prices, set conditions to make an order, or manage customer information, he or she must often rely on information from different systems, physical files, or other sources.

EpicConfigurator simplifies and solves the issues mentioned above. EpicConfigurator makes it easy for User …