Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
55 Sea Slug Simulator
 Jianzhi Long
Yunhan Wang
Ziwei Qiu
 Ruhao Xia design_document1.pdf
design_document2.pdf
design_document4.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
proposal2.pdf
proposal1.pdf
Sea Slug Simulator

Problem: 
We are required to build a prototype robot to simulate the sea slug’s behavior under the presence of several different stimuli such as its enemy and prey. 

Solution Overview: 
In this project, the sea slug is abstracted to an organism with motion ability and sensitivity to the presence of certain stimuli. For demonstration purposes, the sea slug is represented by a robot equipped with two types of sensors. Its natural habitat is represented by a special testing environment with marked boundary containing two different types of stimuli that corresponds to the sea slug’s food and enemy.  

Solution Components:
Motion Module: The slug is represented by a Roomba robot, and Roomba has built-in wheels and motors.


Power Module: The robot system is built on Roomba. Roomba is powered by its own rechargeable battery, and our own controller circuit will be powered by battery. 


Sensor Module: 
The sensors are installed at the front of the sea slug simulator. 
We will use IR sensors to detect the distance between the slug and its surrounding objects.
We will also use IR sensors to detect heat signature preys of predators.
We will use color sensors to detect the type of food the slug likes and not like.

Processing Module:
Raspberry Pi will be served as the processing unit. 
It will take data collected from all the sensors and calculate what the slug would do based on an algorithm. Based on the results, the slug will either run from predators, go for prey, or keep wandering around.
It will also be used to guide Roomba’s movement.

Circuit Module: This module consists of simple circuits to integrate the sensors together, and connect Raspberry Pi with the original robot. The circuit module also required to resemble the natural habitat.

Testing Module: This module will consist of a larger environment which has certain components as stimulants.

Criterion for success:
The sea slug simulator will react to the stimulants in the testing environment as a real sea slug does. 
The sea slug simulator will make the safest choice under complex environments. i.e. The sea slug simulator will choose to run away when its favorite foods and predators occur in the same area.

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Craig Bost, Nicholas Dulin, Drake Proffitt

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

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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.

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