Design Projects/Eng Sci Theses/Etc., 2009/10

This is a page of suggested topics for design projects (ECE496) and Engineering Science fourth-year theses.

Please note: For design projects, I take only 2-person teams.

I'm now full for 2009/10.

Distributed control for vehicle convoying 

This project is based on Hien Goi's MASc research. It involves getting one jeep autonomously to follow the path of a leader jeep. The follower is under computer/vision control -- no driver. See here for more details. The project will be a scaled down version of that one. Depending on your interests, it could involve the vision system (motion estimation), the dynamics/control modeling in Simulink, control theory for wheeled vehicles, etc.

A mobile robot inspection system

In The Netherlands, a dike system holds back the sea, thus providing more inhabitable land. The dikes need to be monitored because over time faults appear. The project is to develop an inspection system of autonomous robots for this task. The project is simulation based. Reference: IJkdijk

Control methods for power electronics

The controllers for power electronic systems, such as DC voltage regulators, frequently use pulse-width modulation. These systems are nonlinear and time-varying, and that presents control challenges. The project is to study existing methods for controller design of DC converters, both analog and digital, and see if recent advanced control techniques have potential merit.

Topics from Previous Years

Factory Automation

Think of a factory making cars. The assembly is done by robots. The robots in turn have to be supplied with parts. This is done by automated guided vehicles (AGVs). The project is to design a system so that the AGVs service the robots with the requirement of minimum wait time.

Robot Music Ensemble

Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, Op. 28, No. 4 is a beautiful piece for the piano. Two robot musicians want to play it, one playing the left-hand part, the other the right-hand part. They have to coordinate in tempo and they do so by listening to each other. The project is to design such a system, where each robot is a PC with a speaker and microphone. (Thanks to Jimmy Qiu for this idea.)

The Art Gallery Problem

The guards in this art gallery are robots. They have to be deployed to maximize coverage. This is a problem in “locational optimization.” These in turn are “spatial resource allocation” problems (e.g., where to put mailboxes in a city, where to put cache servers on the Internet). The project is to design and implement a distributed asynchronous algorithm to deploy the robots for maximum coverage.

Intelligent Highway System

The goal of the PATH project in California is to automate car flow on the freeway to increase flow-rate, reduce pollution, and reduce accidents. This project is a mini-version. You will design a software platform to simulate a platoon of cars moving under automatic control in a dedicated freeway lane. The lead car will have cruise control only, while the following ones will maintain safe distances from the cars ahead. Cars will be allowed to enter and leave the platoon. The platoon must be safe to all possible contingencies; for example, if one car in the platoon gets a flat tire, no collisions can occur. The project requires software development and control engineering. Possible platform: Netlogo

Adaptive Traffic-light System

Design a city-wide distributed traffic-light system that adapts in real time to traffic conditions. The problem is one of distributed control, so one issue to be addressed is how to implement a distributed, decentralized system. Reference Netlogo

Helicopter Control System

Design a digital control system for a model helicopter provided. The helicopter is pinned and has two degrees of motion: pitch and yaw. You have to model the helicopter dynamics in Simulink, design a continuous-time controller, implement the controller on a PC using Wincon.

Real-time Control System

The hardware lab in ECE410 and ECE411 involves a cart-pendulum system. The project is to design a digital controller on one PC that will control two cart-pendulum systems at the same time. This involves real-time task scheduling. Reference: ECE411 course notes, Chapter 5 (available from me).