Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
44 Brain-controlled portable programmable embedded system
Research Award
Shiyang Liu
Xuanyu Zhong
Yujie Chen
design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
video0.mp4
Nowadays, people use their hands to control modern computing systems as well as consumer electronics. We type keyboards, or swipe on tablets with our fingers as a means of input. Many other people also take the advantage of voice control everyday which is being considered as one of the very innovative inputting methods. Based on the trend of how technology gets developed today, we see the next step of inputting as we getting use of our brains.

Imagine that we need to take a look at the next step of a recipe when we get our hands messed with all the food while cooking. Swiping on the iPad then sounds very tedious. Instead, would it be nice to do so by just staring at a specific region on the screen and turn to another page of cookbook. This region blinks at a predefined frequency. By looking at it, our brains will also "blink" at the same frequency and the generated signals can be captured and distinguished from other signals with different frequencies, which will consequently allows various control options. (not just flipping recipe pages)

Our goal of this project is to build a prototype of brain-controlled portable programmable embedded system with a LCD screen that will satisfy basic functionality of our everyday computation and its user interface. With the help of electroencephalography, our device will be built on top of a micro-controller which reads input from various signals from our brains and thus supports hands-free interactions between users and computing system which will be reflected on a built-in LCD display.

A simple diagram can be found here which illustrates the basic idea of this project:
http://i1285.photobucket.com/albums/a599/sc21cn/ScreenShot2013-01-31at25324PM_zps11908c3f.png
[Note that our project consists of the micro-controller, LCD screen along with some other hardware components and wireless part. The graph represents what we propose to do within this semester (a sort of prototype). However, it may be made more advanced in the future, such as integrating the screen onto the glasses or caps people wear everyday. But it is just for future consideration.]

Amphibious Spherical Explorer

Kaiwen Chen, Junhao Su, Zhong Tan

Amphibious Spherical Explorer

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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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