Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
71 Rear Collision Bicycle Warning System
 Gus Kroll
Justin Davis
Seongwoo Kang
 Xihang Wu appendix1.ino
appendix2.py
design_document1.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
photo1.PNG
presentation1.pdf
proposal1.pdf
##Problem: In the US, many cities and densely populated areas such as college campuses, do not have adequate infrastructure for bicyclists. This leads to an often unorganized and chaotic environment for cyclists to ride. While it is easy for most cyclists to manage this environment when they can see it coming, it is much harder to also be paying equal attention to cars, other cyclists, and objects approaching from the rear. Similar to cars, even with rearview mirrors and side view mirrors, most manufacturers are still including lane change sensors. The added value of this technology is that even though you can look at mirrors to see what is around you, it requires all of our attention just to manage what is going on in front of us and these sensors take on a lot of the burden of notifying us of potentially dangerous situations developing outside of our direct line of site.

##Solution: The goal of this product is to notify cyclists of objects approaching from behind so they can maintain focus on what is in front of them. The field of view would be approximately 90-120 degrees. This would cover objects directly behind and objects behind and to the side of the rider. This system should be low cost, able to be used on all types of bicycles. It is not intended to be a collision avoidance system, simply a warning system.

The system will work using multiple ultrasonic sensors. Using a bit of hardware filtering to reduce noise and, some math and software to control object detection we should be able to generally ensure that we can identify when an object is moving towards the bike from behind at speed and give the rider a warning that something is approaching from behind via some combination of vibration in the handlebars/seat, LED’s and sound.

##Systems:
Power - Battery, On/Off Switch
Sensors - Ultrasonic Sensors (at least 3)
Warning System - Noise Filtering Components, LEDs, DC motor (can deliver vibrations to handlebars), Speaker
Control - Microcontroller

##Criterion for success
To begin, in a controlled environment we want to be able to detect an object's location and determine it’s implied path (will assume linear movement for processing speed) at a distance >20 ft, and notify the rider. The next step would be to replicate the above results while maintaining a low false positive rate but increase the distance to 40-50 ft reliably. Then, again replicate this test in a moderately busy environment such as riding around campus, except on Green St. Green St will be the trickiest environment as there is the most noise to filter. Again the criterion for success in these more complex environments would be the same as in the lab environment.

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Craig Bost, Nicholas Dulin, Drake Proffitt

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Featured Project

Our group proposes to create robot drummer which would respond to human voice "beatboxing" input, via conventional dynamic microphone, and translate the input into the corresponding drum hit performance. For example, if the human user issues a bass-kick voice sound, the robot will recognize it and strike the bass drum; and likewise for the hi-hat/snare and clap. Our design will minimally cover 3 different drum hit types (bass hit, snare hit, clap hit), and respond with minimal latency.

This would involve amplifying the analog signal (as dynamic mics drive fairly low gain signals), which would be sampled by a dsPIC33F DSP/MCU (or comparable chipset), and processed for trigger event recognition. This entails applying Short-Time Fourier Transform analysis to provide spectral content data to our event detection algorithm (i.e. recognizing the "control" signal from the human user). The MCU functionality of the dsPIC33F would be used for relaying the trigger commands to the actuator circuits controlling the robot.

The robot in question would be small; about the size of ventriloquist dummy. The "drum set" would be scaled accordingly (think pots and pans, like a child would play with). Actuators would likely be based on solenoids, as opposed to motors.

Beyond these minimal capabilities, we would add analog prefiltering of the input audio signal, and amplification of the drum hits, as bonus features if the development and implementation process goes better than expected.

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