AN AUTONOMOUS ROBOT FOR THE COLLECTION AND EXTERMINATION OF TICKS

John B Puvogel, Justin H. Woulfe, Dennis J. Crump, Glenn B. Hammond (David Livingston PE, PhD, James Squire PE, PhD, Daniel Sonenshine, PhD)

Ticks are a heath hazard; infesting our pets and vectoring human diseases such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Lyme disease. We propose a robotics-based solution to reduce tick populations. The ecotone, a fifteen foot wide swath defining the boundary between cultivated lawn and woods, is the ticks natural habitat. A small perforated tube is routed around the ecotone that emits a chemoattractant such as carbon dioxide, drawing ticks from the ecotone into a narrowly-defined path. A robot is programmed to travel around this path collecting and exposing ticks to promethren, a common insecticide. The chemoattractant tube also houses a signal wire that the robot follows using magnetic sensors to navigate the path, sweeping the entire ecotone. Sensor information is relayed to the robots microcontroller which, using a fuzzy logic algorithm, keeps the robot directly over the tube and the attracted ticks. The robot stops every lap in a specially designed shed to be recharged, cleaned, and UV sterilized. If continued for three months, the ticks life cycle will be broken leaving the protected area tick-free for years.

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Development of Leg Control Mechanisms for A Radially Symmetric Octopedal Robot (April 2005)

John M. Lento Jr., Zachary K. Huson (David Livingston PE, PhD)

As the initial stage of a project to create an eight-legged walking robot, a three-jointed robot leg was built, with a servo-motor controlling the angle of each joint. Driving the servo-motors to produce a useful gait required solving the inverse-kinematic problem of deriving joint angles for a desired end-effector (foot) position, which is highly under-determined. The two most promising candidate solutions, involving neuralnetwork controllers for the motors, failed because of an inadequate appreciation of the limitations on the possible positions of the foot. An analytic solution was subsequently obtained by artificially limiting the joint angles, resulting in a useful if limited gait. Taken together these results suggest that a broader range of solutions may be obtained with a neural-network or other non-analytic approach that respects the inherent geometry of end-effector positions.

Smart Medical Refrigerator (March 2005)*

Paul Kuwik, Thomas Largi, Matt York, Dennis Crump (James C. Squire PE, PhD, David Livingston, PE, PhD)

Social mobility and an aging population have resulted in a higher number of elderly living alone without nearby family than ever before, and they are at-risk of fatal complications from minor accidents because of lack of monitoring. Elderly diabetics are particularly at risk from a host of diabetes-related health complications, yet home healthcare services are frequently unaffordable or unavailable. A team of four undergraduate electrical engineering students advised by a biomedical engineer, a computer engineer, and a physician designed a medical internet-aware insulin refrigerator for sucha patient living alone. The device consists of a small refrigerator monitored by an embedded microcontroller and connected to a standard telephone outlet. The microcontroller monitors patient access to the smart medical refrigerator. If the door is not opened in a 16-hour period, the microcontroller dials an internet service provider and sends an email and/or a pager alert to a physician or family member anywhere in the world. The system also has an integrated battery-backup that automatically takes over if AC power fails, automatically charges when AC power is available, fully charges in under 60 minutes, and can sustain an hour and a half power outage. The refrigerator has been through two design evaluations with a physician and has been tested during a week-long trial by a diabetic patient.

* Avaliable through IEEE Website Only. You must have your own username and password.

Optical Multiplexer

Paul Kuwick '05, and Tom Largi '05

Frequency division multiplexing is a technique to combine multiple different signals onto a single communications line, such as on a computer network or telephone wire. Although the mathematical derivations are an advanced ECE concept, we created a microprocessor-controlled multimedia demonstration that intuitively shows how multiple signals can be combined, transmitted on a single channel, and then separated.

Specifically, we programmed a microcontroller to control the individual notes played by a heavily-modified stripped electronic keyboard to recite the Top Gun theme. Electronic signals are also sent to two powerful lights to flash in synchronization to the audio sounds - blue that flashes with each bass note, and red that flashes to each melody note. The melody note light passes through a red chromatic filter, and the bass light passes through a blue filter. The lights are then combined using a half-silvered mirror. The combined signal is sent out of the transmitting unit using a diameter acrylic light pipe. An individual will see each light blink in a different rhythmic pattern while viewing the combined signal of both lights on the single optical pipe. The audio signal is played on speakers to reinforce the concept of seeing two signals being multiplexed onto a single channel.

The receiving unit, built of clear acrylic, takes the output of the pipe, and divides the combined signal into each of its original component parts using half-silvered mirrors and light filters, thus reinforcing the concept that two different signals can be combined onto a single line, then re-divided with no information loss.

Steve Lee '02 initiated this project, however, he was unable to finish the project before he graduated. Cadets Paul Kuwik '05 and Tom Largi '05 finished his project with Major Squire as their academic advisor. The Kuwik and Largi received a Wetmore research grant to develop the project, and presented their work at the 2003 Virginia Military Institute Undergraduate Research Symposium. The demonstration has been accepted by the Western Virginia Museum of Science and will be displayed there in August of 2003.

Smart Catheter

Steve Lee '02 and Matt Brooks '02

The Smart Catheter Project involved constructing several biomedical catheters with embedded sensors and developing the electronic hardware and software to display the signal graphically on a laptop computer. The system is designed to be used to deploy endovascular stents in the coronary arteries of people suffering from advanced atherosclerosis. This system provides the interventional cardiologist with real time data that previous systems lacked to assist optimal expansion and placement. We essentially built the first working prototypes of a design patented earlier by our advisor, MAJ Squire, and were funded to do so through a grant from the Biomedical Engineering Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Matt Brooks graduated with Institute Honors and published a thesis based on this work, and he and MAJ Squire were jointly awarded the VMI Hinman Research Award. Steve Lee and COL Livingston were also part of the team and made important contributions in the area of software programming and communications protocols.