Fall 2009

f09

 

Ubiquitous Geographical Positioning System

Sponsored by SAIC – www.saic.com

The project we propose is a ubiquitous geo-positioning system that would allow a team of users to track their positions using a myriad of sensors, which allows positional tracking without the limits seen by current GPS units. The drawback to current GPS units is that they cannot track positions inside of buildings or other places that shield signals coming from satellites. The Dead Reckoning system will allow a user to see his or her position on a reference background map as well as the positions of other members on their team. The information will also be sent to a central location that observers the locations of each team member as well. The Dead Reckoning system will be comprised of two separate modules. The first is a display unit worn on the wrist that communicates wirelessly to the second module, a sensor package, which calculates the user’s current location. The sensor package also receives the location of other sensor packages on the team and sends this to the touch screen for display. The sensor unit gathers raw data from an array of COTS sensors and passes data to the EDGE software, an algorithm designed by SAIC which processes the raw data and returns a highly accurate position. The display unit will communicate with the sensor module over a short range wire replacement radio. Once a position is received from the sensor package, a microcontroller on the wrist unit will plot the position on a touch sensitive LCD. The LCD will have a background map and small colored indicators to mark the location of each team member being tracked. The user will have the option to view their position on the map or see their position data on the screen in text. The display device will be worn on the wrist/arm and the sensor module will be strapped to the back, every effort will be made to minimize the inconvenience to the wearer of the device.

 

 

Biologically Integrated Independent Biofeedback System

Sponsored by CUBIC Corp. – www.cubic.com

The lives of military combatants and first responders such as firefighters, miners, and hazmat workers have been lost because of dangerous working situations and environments. Operating in these dangerous environments have been known to cause stress related heart attacks, chronic physiological ailments, and potentially fatal situations. Lives could be saved by a system which remotely monitors vital signs, makes an assessment of the person’s health status and activity level, tracks their location, and relays this information to a command station in real-time. Such a system is of ongoing interest to FEMA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security.

 

 

Golf Club Alert System

Sponsored by J. K. & M. S.

The Wedge Watcher is a portable device that delves into the world of passive RFID tagging to help in the prevention of lost assets. Our objective is to lower the amount of lost golf clubs and the frustration associated with leaving a club behind. The system consists of a lightweight, battery operated, RFID reader that is attached to the side of a golf bag. This module, when paired with passive RFID tags on the golf clubs themselves, can help to determine if those golf clubs are being lost or forgotten on the course. The tags will be mounted to the clubs with tape and the reader will be securely fastened to the outside lip of the bag via a clip. This product will allow the user to be alerted by means of an audible alarm and an indicator on the LCD, when golf clubs are misplaced or not returned to the bag.

 

 

Wireless Lithium-Polymer Battery Charger

Sponsored by Tandem Diabetes- www.tandemdiabetes.com

The Request for Proposal offered by Tandem Diabetes, Inc. specifies key requirements that dictate the overall behavior and appearance of the system to be designed. Mainly, the product desired to meet these requirements would be a system that is to charge a Lithium-Polymer (LiPo) battery that is sealed within a portable device. A large advantage with sealing the portable device and battery is to facilitate waterproofing, and simplify patient leakage power testing for medical devices. Due to the fact that the portable device is sealed, power is to be transferred wirelessly from a Universal Serial Bus (USB) to the battery, in effect charging the LiPo battery. From the USB Host’s point of view, it is charging the battery directly through the Constant Current Constant Voltage (CCCV) scheme where the input current to the battery is held steady around 0.3C (per requirement) until the battery terminal voltage reaches the nominal value and then this voltage is held steady to maintain the electrical charge within the battery.

 

 

Wireless Water Monitoring System

Sponsored by Dr. Mahasweta Sarkar

The AquaMizer Wireless Water Monitoring System is a simple solution to the growing problem of water shortages. The AquaMizer system it provides the individual homeowner with the opportunity to monitor water use from multiple locations like the shower and kitchen faucets. The amount of water used from these individual units can then be transmitted to a LCD display unit which will then display the real time usage to the homeowner. The main functions of this system are to keep track of the amount of water used in different areas of a house, calculate the cost of water, and show a summary of the results both individually and as a whole. Since every water district is different, and the cost of water varies from one district to another, a unique feature of this device is the ability for the customer to input cost and billing data through a user friendly medium. The AquaMizer is a portable and cost effective solution for monitoring water expenditure in the average household.

 

Navigation System for Visually Impaired Shopper

Sponsored by Dr. Andrew Szeto

Our goal is to design a system that will assist visually impaired shoppers in a grocery store to navigate and find available products while avoiding collisions with objects. The design will incorporate a shopping cart that will have a mounted RFID reader with antenna, an ultrasonic distance measurement device tied into a vibration mechanism for collision avoidance, Hall Effect sensors to calculate distance traversed, a wireless headset, and a mobile power source. Our back-end server will be outfitted with voice recognition technology, a MSSQL database, as well as the logic for in-store navigation. The shopping cart and the back-end server will communicate through a wire replacement radio. The system will rely predominately on the store computer (the back-end server) as the brain, while the shopping cart continually relays location information and requests to the server. The cart will read RFID Tags along the shelves and transmit data back to the server which will use a pre-rendered map of the store to determine the cart’s current location. The system will utilize two channels: a digital channel and an analog, audio channel. The digital channel will carry the one-way digital information regarding the shopper’s location from the cart to the store computer. The audio channel will relay requests from the customer to the computer as well as directions from the computer back to the customer via a headset. With this technology we hope to make it so the customer will no longer have trouble navigating around the store.