Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Senior Design Day

When you're in college, your entire 4-year undergraduate study cumulates into one big class - Senior Design. My Senior Design class is 2 semesters, and it is a (very) large capstone project that demonstrates all my knowledge I have gained over the years that I have spent at UNT.

My capstone won't be finished for another 365 days. In the mean time, here's some things that some classmates worked on here at Discovery Park!

"Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: Quadcopter"
Electrical Engineering
Computer Engineering


This first project (pictured above) is work put together by the College of Engineering's own Electrical and Computer Engineering students Andrew Arbini, Matt Ponce, and Chase Przilas. As you can see, the project is titled "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: Quadcopter". If you've ever seen those neat youtube videos of quadcopters playing pong, this is the sort of thing these are capable of. Extremely stable, very precise, and can bare a light load. This particular project is designed "to construct an unmanned aerial vehicle that will have full capabilities of implementing a surveillance system." It goes on to say that is is designed to maneuver tight locations. I could imagine breaking into a compound and deploying one of these in front of your SEAL team to capture or kill a certain suspect may come in handy ;)

All joking aside that's a neat project. There were dozens of projects from every department on display that day. Another poster:

"Autonomous Vision Based Planetary Surface Explorer"
Electrical Engineering
Computer Science


I actually show this project to everyone I give tours to. It uses a Segway, XBOX Kinnect unit, power supply and computer (MAC) to work, and the end result is an autonomous robot. It's neat to see it roam around and balance itself when pushed, stop to avoid obstacles, and view the infrared and visual output on the MAC. The project is funded in part by NASA, as the logo in the top right corner proves, and the idea is to develop autonomous roaming, roving, smart robots. The current Mars rovers are "dumb" in that they require constant oversight by controllers on earth. --Nah I shouldn't say dumb, just different. Outdated perhaps..



The landing sequence of the mars rovers was so neat.

Anyway there were many more projects. Here's some more pictures I took that day:

Well done design classes!