Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
6 Quadpod transform vehicle
Area Award: Robotics
 Jiwon Park
Keewoong Haan
Zenon Son
 Rajarshi Roy design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.document
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Our main purpose in this project is transformation. The idea we had was to build a scaled model of a vehicle, which would transform into a quadpod when the vehicle encounters obstacle. The obstacle could be any place difficult to move by vehicle but we're mainly focusing on rough unpaved road or hill. Since we already have certain design schematic in our mind, we wonâ??t be using an already built car; we will build both car and the leg parts of the project from the scratch. There will be 2 legs on each side, which will be hidden inside the vehicle while in car mode. We will be using minimum of 5 motors (1 motor for vehicle motor and at least 4 motors for the legs). The 4 legs will be fixed at certain position and will follow a circular motion similar to that of train. We are also thinking of installing a touch sensor inside the front bumper of the vehicle, so that it can detect the obstacle whenever the vehicle hits it for a few sec. The project will be fully controllable by the user with a wired controller. We believe this project is important because this scaled version of vehicle can access places (mountain and bumpy roads) that the vehicle cannot get through with typical wheels. This project merely shows the basic concept of the transformable vehicle but it may help the vehicle to be used in more various situations in the future.

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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