This page list some of the student projects my students have completed over the last few years. They are the projects that have some image processing or mechanical component that actually can be seen on a video.
Many of the movies on this page were encoded with 3ivx MPEG-4 encoder. You might have to down load the decoder. Click on the pictures to play the movies. If your default plug-in does not work you will have to down load the movie and play it with your favorite player. It seems that the 3ivx-encoded movies do not play on QuickTime. (It hurts me to say that Internet Explorer seems to do a better job with this than Firefox.)
Spring 2006Timmy - a crack climbing robot Andrew Flynn and Tietjen Hynes built and programmed Timmy to climb cracks.
|
|
Spring 2005
| Coke Can Picker Upper - Eric Kidd and Curt Monaco Eric and Curt built a robot controlled by a PC104 computer that found coke cans using a standard web cam and retrieved them for recycling. Here is 61 meg video where Eric describes the robot.
|
|
| SpongeBob - Taylor and Sudip SpongeBob automatically moves its sponges, the three in the back row closest to the robotic arm in response to your moving your sponges. Sponges were used because they were easier for the robotic manipulator to grasp. |
|
| Marble Sorter - Lars, Omar and Leon Using a robotic arm and computer vision marbles are sorted by color. Marbles are confined to an area on a table with a bead of hot glue. Red marbles are pushed out on one side and green marbles are pushed out on the other side. When marbles are clumped together the arm will break the clumps. The algorithm is always try to push the marble closest to the goal, which does not always work well. |
|
| Maze Mapping - Thomas,
Nicholas and Allison Using computer vision a robotic arm is guided through a maze using visual servoing. Then the arm is quickly returned to the start using the memorized path. |
 |
| Poker Face - Chris, Jeff and Faisal Read a poker hand from five cards laid in any orientation on the table. The cards are segmented from the image, transformed into a normalized so the number and suite can be found. Neural networks are then used to recognize the ordinality of the card. |
|
| Speed Racer - Duo, Lucius, Aris A multiplayer racing game than can be controlled from the keyboard or with hand gestures. If you are using MS Windows you can download and run the game. Unpack the zip-file and run /NFD Game/NFD.exe.
|
 |
| Shape Scanner The robotics class built robotic arms with distance sensors at the end and scanned the table for objects . In this video they found a roll of duct tape. |
|
Winter 2005
| Tenzing - A Rock Climbing Robot - Kwasi Ohene-Adu and Alex Clay with help graduate student Ed Wei further refined the software for Tenzing as part of their undergraduate theses. This movie shows the robot autonomously standing up which requires the coordination of eight motors while maintaining the pressure on four holds. |
|
| Sorting m&ms - Darrel Hoy and
David Fullerton Using a robotic arm and computer vision m&ms are sorted by color. Here is another run where ten are sorted. Darrel and David are taking sponsorship offers. |
|
| Climbing a Jungle Gym - Andrew Flynn, Lee Winkler and Terrence
Irving Here is a a multimedia presentation the group did. A DVD of Turkish's climbing exploit is available upon request.
|
|
Spring 2004
| Representing Sound as
Movement - Rizwan Mahmud As a senior honors thesis Riz controlled a synthesizer using the motion of a red ball. The video shows him modulating the guitar output by moving the ball at the end of his guitar neck. (This is not the video seen by the computer.) |
|
| Tenzing - A Rock Climbing Robot -
take 1 A class of 18 students designed and did the initial programming of Tenzing, a rock climbing robot. |
|
Spring 2003
| Navigating a Maze using Street Signs - Take 2 Still looking for the lost video of this project. |
 |
| Rock Climbing Robot - Take 1 A simple rock climbing robot that was made with hobbyist servo motors, Plexiglas and aluminum stock from the hardware store. The only power tools used were a drill and a Dremel tool. |
|
Spring 2002
| Parking a Car - Ira
Juneau and Leonard Maiorani Ira and Lenny built a robotic car that exits a parking space, drives to the next parking space and parks. constructing the robot
|
|
| Navigating a Maze using Street Signs - Leonard Maiorani, Mike Reinstein and
Alan Paulsen a maze made from 2x4's is navigated using street signs. No video. |
 |
|
Lady
Bug Following a Light
This was a lab for a Computer Architecture. Students controlled a servo motor from the parallel port of a computer by generating a pulse width modulated from an assembly language driver for the timer interrupt. An Analog-to-Digital Converter (you can see it on the proto-board) is used to digitized the signal from the light sensor. Marc Felio came up with the lady bug decoration. |
|
Fall 2001
|
Mapping a Labyrinth - Take 2 Students upgraded the
hardware to a robotic tank controlled by a PC104 computer using an optical
mouse is used to measure distance traveled. |
|
Spring 2001
| Find and
Infrared Beacon - Colin, Lenny and Robert
Navigate a maze of 2x4s and find the infrared beacon sitting behind the Gateway box and waste basket. The car started in the upper right, and has already made if down that corridor before the video starts.
|
|
| 1-D Ping
Pong Student in Real-Time Embedded Systems course had a little competition hitting a ping pong ball back and forth between the two 2x4s. The ball was detected with photo sensors and then a robotic arm made of Legos and powered by a hobbyist servo motor was made to return the ball back. The code ran on embedded 68HC12 microcontroller.
|
|
Fall 2000
| Mapping a Maze
- Take 1 Mapping a maze with a robot built from an R/C car base and Handy Board or as we affectionately called it a Handy Car. |
|
| Active Steering of Trailer - Brian Nestrick and Symen
Mulders Can you actively
steer a trailer so you can make tighter turns than
without active steering?
|
|
Please send comments and correction to