Checkout, Awards, and Pizza

Description

Checkout Day usually occurs on Reading Day after Final Reports have been turned in. You'll need to turn in your lab notebook, return all of the major parts belonging to the university to your TA, and make sure that nothing is missing from your lab kit before you will receive a grade in the class. After Checkout, a short Awards ceremony will be held to honor those who, in the course staff's opinions, have managed to deliver exemplary projects during the semester. Immediately afterwards, you are all welcome to celebrate your project completion with free pizza and soda with the rest of you classmates!

Requirements and Grading

The Checkout Form will be your documentation that you turned in the lab kit - both you and your TA need to sign it before you turn it in to your TA.

Submission and Deadlines

The specific date and time for lab checkout can be found on the the course calendar.

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.