Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
3 Solar Drone (Quadrotor Helicopter UAV powered by sun)
Area Award: Controls
 Jie Wang
Jinming Zhang
Yingkan Ni
 design_document0.document
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.ppt
proposal0.pdf
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), or commonly known as drone, is a type of aircraft without a human pilot on board, as the name suggested, but controlled autonomously by computers and/or taking commands from remote stations. The UAVs are perfect candidates for tasks that are tedious or dangerous for human, for example, patrolling along boarder lines, wild fire control, aerial surveillance and etc.
The applications of UAV, as described above, generally require long flight time and reliable power supply. While the current UAV designs utilizing traditional battery or fuel cells struggles to meet such requirement, this project aims to provide a innovative solution to this problem by introducing the current popular photovoltaic system into the UAV power system design. Such design will combine the sustainability of solar energy with the reliability of battery. This project focuses on the electrical components of the design and aims to provide a platform for future development on solar powered UAVs.

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Craig Bost, Nicholas Dulin, Drake Proffitt

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Featured Project

Our group proposes to create robot drummer which would respond to human voice "beatboxing" input, via conventional dynamic microphone, and translate the input into the corresponding drum hit performance. For example, if the human user issues a bass-kick voice sound, the robot will recognize it and strike the bass drum; and likewise for the hi-hat/snare and clap. Our design will minimally cover 3 different drum hit types (bass hit, snare hit, clap hit), and respond with minimal latency.

This would involve amplifying the analog signal (as dynamic mics drive fairly low gain signals), which would be sampled by a dsPIC33F DSP/MCU (or comparable chipset), and processed for trigger event recognition. This entails applying Short-Time Fourier Transform analysis to provide spectral content data to our event detection algorithm (i.e. recognizing the "control" signal from the human user). The MCU functionality of the dsPIC33F would be used for relaying the trigger commands to the actuator circuits controlling the robot.

The robot in question would be small; about the size of ventriloquist dummy. The "drum set" would be scaled accordingly (think pots and pans, like a child would play with). Actuators would likely be based on solenoids, as opposed to motors.

Beyond these minimal capabilities, we would add analog prefiltering of the input audio signal, and amplification of the drum hits, as bonus features if the development and implementation process goes better than expected.

Project Videos