Continuing your Project

Description

Groups that wish to continue their projects are encouraged to sign up for Undergraduate Independent Study: ECE 396, ECE 397, ECE 497, or ECE 499.

Funds of up to $500 are available in order to defray project expenses. These funds have been generously provided by the ECE Alumni Fund and may be used for materials and supplies, equipment, computer software, etc. Funds may not be used for salaries or wages. Purchases may be made through the ECE Business Office, ECE Stores or reimbursement of personal funds with proper documentation. More information will be provided upon approval.

Please see the Undergraduate Independent Study Funding page for more details.

The Leung Fund provides another avenue for obtaining funding to continue a project conceived of in ECE 445. Prior projects have also continued through various programs in the College of Engineering's Technology Entrepreneur Center programs, including the Cozad New Venture Competition.

Amphibious Spherical Explorer

Kaiwen Chen, Junhao Su, Zhong Tan

Amphibious Spherical Explorer

Featured Project

The amphibious spherical explorer (ASE) is a spherical robot for home monitoring, outdoor adventure or hazardous environment surveillance. Due to the unique shape of the robot, ASE can travel across land, dessert, swamp or even water by itself, or be casted by other devices (e.g. slingshot) to the mission area. ASE has a motion-sensing system based on Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and rotary magnetic encoder, which allows the internal controller to adjust its speed and attitude properly. The well-designed control system makes the robot free of visible wobbliness when it is taking actions like acceleration, deceleration, turning and rest. ASE is also a platform for research on control system design. The parameters of the internal controller can be assigned by an external control panel in computer based on MATLAB Graphic User Interface (GUI) which communicates with the robot via a WiFi network generated by the robot. The response of the robot can be recorded and sent back to the control panel for further analysis. This project is completely open-sourced. People who are interested in the robot can continue this project for more interesting features, such as adding camera for real-time surveillance, or controller design based on machine learning.

Project Videos