Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
5 Hotdog- Solar Powered Heated Doghouse
Area Award: Solar Energy
 Gurbaaz Sidhu
Krista Giacobazzi
Lynn Deasey
 design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.presentation
proposal0.pdf
The purpose of the solar powered heated doghouse is to provide a solution to leaving your dog outside in a doghouse for the weekend, when cold temperatures are expected. The dog house will be powered entirely by solar panels on the roof. There will be heating elements on the floor. Insulating the dog house will be extremely important because with only solar power, we cannot afford wasted heat. We also plan on having some settings and safety features. There will be a temperature setting so the user can select how warm they want the doghouse. When the house becomes warmer than the owner set, the heat will be turned off. When the temperature becomes too cold, the heat will be turned on. We also plan on preventing the dog bowl from freezing, so the dog will be able to drink water. We are still debating about the most efficient method to do this. We also will be adding a fan to the dog house, so the dog will be more comfortable in the summer.

Amphibious Spherical Explorer

Kaiwen Chen, Junhao Su, Zhong Tan

Amphibious Spherical Explorer

Featured Project

The amphibious spherical explorer (ASE) is a spherical robot for home monitoring, outdoor adventure or hazardous environment surveillance. Due to the unique shape of the robot, ASE can travel across land, dessert, swamp or even water by itself, or be casted by other devices (e.g. slingshot) to the mission area. ASE has a motion-sensing system based on Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and rotary magnetic encoder, which allows the internal controller to adjust its speed and attitude properly. The well-designed control system makes the robot free of visible wobbliness when it is taking actions like acceleration, deceleration, turning and rest. ASE is also a platform for research on control system design. The parameters of the internal controller can be assigned by an external control panel in computer based on MATLAB Graphic User Interface (GUI) which communicates with the robot via a WiFi network generated by the robot. The response of the robot can be recorded and sent back to the control panel for further analysis. This project is completely open-sourced. People who are interested in the robot can continue this project for more interesting features, such as adding camera for real-time surveillance, or controller design based on machine learning.

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