Publications
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RBE 2001 Curriculum Review
The RBE curriculum has been known to be particularly rigorous, with RBE 2001 being regarded as one of the more difficult courses. This project’s objective was to make suggestions to the curriculum review committee to aid in reducing the difficulty of the course while maintaining the amount of information that students learn as a result of taking the course. Key issues were identified based on surveys, course evaluations, and interviews. These interviews were conducted on students, teaching assistants, student assistants, and professors associated with the course. As a result of the aforementioned methods, it became apparent that the labs, final project, and reference materials were the crux of the issue. This project created suggestions for lab improvements, a new final project, and additional materials to aid students with use of lab equipment and key concepts that are difficult to understand.
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Automatic Vehicle Recharging Station (AVRS)
The goal of this project is to recharge autonomous electric vehicles, thus automating one of the last steps preventing a level 5 autonomous vehicle from being completely independent from human assistance. For this project we are using an ABB industrial robotic arm with a custom end effector. Our tooling has force sensing and a tool changer, allowing for switching between a pneumatic flap opener and two charging port standards. To help us achieve this goal we implemented custom computer vision and point cloud processing software. System integration was done using ROS-Industrial. Ultimately, while we were able to plug in our test vehicle using the ABB arm, there were issues with latency as well as with the reliability of the real time path planning features of ROS-Industrial.