News Release
ECE 191 Design Teams Report Progress on Projects Funded by Calit2 and Other Sponsors
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| Course instructor Clark Guest chats with the winning project team, Gizmo Talk, sponsored by Calit2's Circuits Lab. (left to right) Clark Guest, Nguyen Nguyen, Jeff Cuenco, Alicia Courtney, Daniel Su and Justin Tse around the Gizmo truck. |
San Diego, CA, April 6, 2008 -- A project adding two-way wireless audio capability to a remote-controlled vehicle called Gizmo -- designed for disaster response communication -- was awarded best project of the winter quarter ECE 191 team engineering design course when the students made their final presentations.
The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department's Engineering Group Design Project course (ECE 191) provides undergraduate students with hands-on experience working in a team to design, build, demonstrate, and document an open-ended engineering project. The final presentations took place March 21.
The UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) sponsored or cosponsored eight of the 10 undergraduate projects in the course. "Calit2 appreciates student participation at all levels of research," said B.S. Manoj, a Calit2 researcher and group mentor, "and ECE 191 provides a wonderful forum for undergraduates to participate in advanced areas of research."
Quarter after quarter, each group of students finds the hands-on, group engineering experience unique, stimulating and valuable to their future work in either academia or industry. "This was a great hands-on experience," said Nguyen Nguyen, who worked on the Gizmo project. "Not only did I gain technical knowledge, but obtained skills in teamwork as well, which is very important in industry."
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| Ed Johnson presenting his group project "Camera-Based Hand and Body Driven Interaction Within Immersive Virtual Reality Environments." Other group members were Adam Nuhaily and Chris Young. |
The winning project team of Nguyen, Courtney as well as Justin Tse and Daniel Su was mentored by Calit2 researchers Javier Rodriguez Molina and Don Kimball. Kimball is the head of Calit2's High Performance Circuits and Networking research section at UCSD. The student team developed and built a working prototype for streaming audio and video from Gizmo to a laptop and streaming audio from the laptop back to Gizmo. Forwarding sensor data to the Gizmo Control application is pending additional testing. They also mounted two ultrasonic distance sensors on Gizmo and integrated them with the existing graphical user interface (GUI) and circuit board to detect and process distance information.
The team was happy that their efforts were rewarded. Speaking for the group, who nodded in agreement, Courtney noted, "It was very much a group effort, we couldn't have done it without Justin, his experience really helped a lot, as did our mentors, and Jeff [Cuenco] too." Justin does project management for the IEEE club and had led several projects previously. For his part, Justin said, "I enjoy the rewarding feeling of completing something and after long hours of work seeing it actually work."
Team member Nguyen's joy extends even further, to include his experience at UCSD. He is an education abroad student from the National University of Singapore, where he is an electrical engineering major. "To study in the United States is my dream from childhood and now my dreams have come true," he said.
Gizmo is a toy-sized, remote-controlled truck which serves as an adaptable and reliable research platform on wheels to deploy different technologies. This autonomous multi-radio device is reconfigurable for the task at hand. It can be controlled by several different interfaces. Gizmo is designed for use in numerous applications, including disaster response environments, radio frequency mapping, data and sensor gathering and educational purposes, as well as others.
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| (left to right) Eldridge Alcantara, Javier Rodriguez Molina and Jeff Cuenco check Gizmo on the way over to the final presentations. |
Alcantara gave a few pointers to this quarter's other Gizmo project: "Telekinesis Glove," which is an expansion of the interface technology to control Gizmo. The team of Sweta Gupta, Melissa N. Wylie and Mayank Gupta was also mentored by Calit2's Rodriguez Molina and Kimball. Their objective was to prototype a wireless glove capable of controlling Gizmo, using triple-axis accelerometers attached to the fingers of the glove and Bluetooth technology as a communication interface.
They developed a working system with two triple-axis accelerometers and a microcontroller mounted on a PC board, which was coded to control communication between accelerometers and Gizmo using a Bluetooth module, also mounted on the PC board. It was successfully tested using HyperTerminal and Bluetooth and is potentially expandable to five accelerometers (one for each finger). Integration with a hand-worn glove is a potential project for subsequent ECE 191 student groups.
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| The "Cognitive Enterprise Wireless Networking" group. (standing, left to right) Jonathan Fleming, Xuanning Gao, Oluwafemi (Femi) Akinwale and Ankit Bhargava; (seated, left to right) Bheemarjuna (Arjun) Reddy Tamma and B.S. Manoj |
Many of the projects are open-ended, where one quarter's project is a stepping stone from previous work, advancing the effort forward, improving and streamlining it, adding capabilities, etc. Many mentors keep coming back each quarter to work with a new group of students, continuing a project to the next level, and occasionally beginning new ones.
"The ATLAS in Silico team has enjoyed working with the students from ECE 191," explains Ruth West, "and being a part of their evolution as they develop creative problem-solving strategies and team-based approaches to research challenges." West is an artist-in-residence and director of visual analytics and interactive technologies at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) and an affiliate of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) and Calit2. With Raj Singh, Todd Margolis and Alex Horn, she mentored Adam Nuhaily, Chris Young and Ed Johnson. Their project, "Camera-Based Hand and Body Driven Interaction Within Immersive Virtual Reality Environments," took place in Calit2's Immersive Visualization lab,using the Varrier autostereoscopic display wall (which permits 3D viewing without 3D glasses).
Another returning mentor was John Pringle of the San Diego Emergency Medical Service (EMS) and Fire Service. He and Calit2 principal development engineer Doug Palmer mentored an EMS-focused project. The School of Medicine's Greg George, Ted Chan and Jim Dunford provided help from the medical perspective.
Building on the fall quarter efforts, Shraddha Chaplot, Jeff Tu, Ankit Bhargava and Justin Kenny created a portable device that can wirelessly transmit data from an EKG to a Palm Treo, then on to the hospital via email. Images, as well as patient information, can also be emailed to the hospital. The process takes less than a minute, making this an efficient and portable solution to streamline the process of getting heart attack patients to cardiac care centers.
Calit2 researcher Jeff Cuenco helped the group as well. Just last spring, Cuenco was an ECE 191 student working on a Circuits Lab project; after graduating, he became a staffer. Jeff also helped the winning Gizmo team, providing some programming assistance.
Like Rodriguez Molina and Kimball of the Circuits Lab, Calit2's interim division director at UCSD, Bill Hodgkiss, also had two groups. The "Wireless Sensor Networks" group tackled a problem close to the heart of many at UCSD: finding an empty parking space. Natalia Lo, John Dale and Tim Manestitaya created, developed and tested new sensors and a wireless sensor network for telling an end-user which parking spots are available. Providing easy access to retrieve real-time data over a self-renewing internet database, the program determines whether a car is parked in the space using the collected sensor data.
Hodgkiss's other group, "Bluetooth Data Transmission," worked to develop a point-to-multipoint short range Bluetooth network that communicates bidirectionally. Daniel Chung, Leonard Yoon and Willy Yang developed a working system that allows users to remotely control two devices in a short-range network to collect and transmit data to a base station. They found that although Bluetooth is a half duplex communication technology, it effectively works as full duplex in this situation. Hodgkiss is also a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and an adjunct professor in ECE.
Calit2 staff researcher Paul Blair mentored Edwin Supardi and Brent Hurley on their project "Physical Activity Meter." They worked on the development of a reliable device for physicians to remotely monitor their patients´ activity levels.
Longtime ECE 191 mentor Michael D. Deshler of Raytheon mentored Azadeh Berenjian, Jon Chen, Andreas Kontokanis and Gloria Toth on their project "Integrated Network Tester and Configuration Tool (INTACT)," which is designed for detecting malfunctions in military command-and-control systems.
ECE professor Clark Guest mentored Junaid Fatehi, Christine Lim and Garrett Wong in developing a "Multipurpose Lab Gizmo," an inexpensive device that would serve as an analog and digital interface between a computer and a lab experiment. This is intended to be used by lower-division ECE students to help them in their labs.
ECE 191 is an upper division course which is part of the design requirement for undergraduates and is typically taken by seniors, although there were several third-year students this quarter. ECE professors Pankaj K. Das and Guest are the instructors. For students interested in taking ECE 191 this spring, there are many interesting projects available.
Two ECE graduate students also presented their final project at the March 21 event. Soha Dalal and Moonjung Kyung's project, "Biologically Motivated Analog-to-Digital Converter," was sponsored by Information Systems Laboratories. They investigated an architecture inspired by biological neural networks, which has been proposed to increase the effective sampling ratio of binary A/D converters. To begin, they implemented single and multi-neuron systems in Matlab to compare their performance and implemented an eight-neuron system in Cadence and confirmed its functionality. They went on to implement a 16-neuron system and simulate it in Matlab, where the characteristics of the system were investigated with different component sizes.
Media Contacts
Maureen C. Curran
Calit2 Communications
858-822-4084
mcurran@ucsd.edu