I found a paper the other day, which utilizes a multitouch interface for controlling and communicating with tasking robots. The device used is a Dell tablet PC, which is mobile enough for the in-field application. The application allows the user to choose a robot and specify a task: go to X, perform reconnaissance, or cross dangerous area. The existing interface below shows that it is not touch friendly, due to the pull down menus and small buttons.

The multitouch interface was redesigned to solve some of the precision issues with the existing interface. Firstly, Windows 7 was used to get better multitouch capabilities. The buttons were made larger, pan and pinch gestures were utilized, and other tools were changed to benefit from touch interactions.

The study consisted of performing several tasks with each interface. The main metric was the speed of completion of each task, and NASA TLX surveys were also used to measure loads with each interface. The results favor the new multitouch interface greatly. This seems like a similar application and study as we are headed toward here at the P54 lab.

Mike Litchfield

The year 2009 has been a busy one for Project54.  We began the year off in February by moving from our garage facility in Madbury to a garage located on campus and within Morse Hall.  The transition of the group from two locations into one has been seamless and has worked out beautifully.  We now have all of our personnel and equipment housed in the same location.

In early May we held an open house to show off our new location as well as to celebrate our 10 year anniversary.  Hard to believe it has been 10 years for the project already.  The weather was great and we had a good turnout with a nice mix of law enforcement, fire dept and campus personnel.

The middle of March brought upon us a flurry of outreach activity beginning with our participation in the UNH High Tech Day a program put on by the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments for area high school students, ECE Open House to welcome freshman along with a steady stream of demonstrations and tours provided to visiting organizations and high schools that has continued through out the year totaling over 500 visitors!

In April we were fortunate enough  to have the opportunity to host Paul Green for a visit to our lab. He gave a great talk on Human Factors Engineering and spent the day visiting us and answering all of our questions.

Amidst our outreach activities demonstrating the Project54 system we have been busy traveling to a variety of conferences, where we have written and had papers and posters accepted for presentation as well as busy with developing and running a number of experiments. For example, Mike Farrar’s experiment “Using Voice to Tag Digital Photographs on the Spot” conducted to determine how effective voice could be in the tagging of photos. Some other experiments by Nemanja Memarovic, Alex Shyrokov and Zeljko Medenica using our driving-simulator and eyetracker to collect a variety of data pertaining to distracted driving and navigation.  During this time we were also busy with recruiting activities leading to the hire of Mark Taipan, a recent BS graduate and former student of Project54. We were very fortunate that Mark accepted the offer for our Research Project Engineer position and is now a staff member of the Project.  Welcome, Mark we are happy to have you as part of the P54 team!

One of the great things about this project is that we have a lot of great students that work with us but the time always arrives where they reach graduation and it seems all too quickly we have to say goodbye. This year we have said goodbye to undergraduates Matt Lape, and David Garneau along with graduates Mike Farrar, Nemanja Memarovic and very soon Alex Shyrokov who is currently preparing his Ph.D defense.  Lastly, Ivan Elhart is leaving us to return to his home country of Serbia. Ivan, thank you for all of your work with the handhelds. Undergraduate, Eric Ojala, who has been with us for roughly a year has also contributed greatly to progress on the handhelds and is, unfortunately for us, leaving to pursue a new position.  Good luck to everyone and thank you for all of your hard work on the project, you will be missed.

So now we are left with working on bringing more students to the project, new undergraduate faces we have currently working on the project are Devin Mullen, Erika Swanson, and Mike Litchfield who started earlier this year and we welcome new Graduate Research Assistants, Dylan Fransway and David Filipovic, who will be starting in January.

It has been a fun and productive year with the new year just around the corner.  Let the holidays begin!

~Erika C.

While looking online, I found some articles about AI that talked about how certain kind of technology could be helpful in the next years for us in order to create better artificial intelligence. Some days later, I was on facebook and my friend posted this link about how computers and machines would “take over” our world. It’s not like it hasn’t already. I mean, we use technology in our everyday lives, but scientists and researchers worry about it being more than just a tool used for our benefit. The link for this article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html

This got me interested in discovering more about AI, so I found this article about a technology called “Imagination Machine”. It’s composed of two artificial neural networks, one of them is in charge of dreaming about an idea and the other one checks if the idea is valid for it to be able to resolve a given task. The link is http://www.wfs.org/May-June09/Thalerpage.htm. Supposedly, this technology would be able to replicate a human brain. And if you think about it, the complications and ethical issues are huge. But I think if we manage to use technology for the greater good, then we should not be worried to much about it.

For example, in this other article that I found, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm,some scientists say that they would be able to re-engineer a artificial human brain in the near future. This is also alarming, but if we think about the outcome of what we could accomplish with this, like learning more about the most obscure part of our bodies and how would we help our future generations or use it for medical reasons.

Erick Janampa

Encyclopedia Britannica gives the definition of a relay. Project54 uses 8 relays in order to control the lights and siren on the Lee Motorcycle, in a relay box. This relay box consists of the 8 relays, and a microcontroller that switches the relays on and off. To turn these relays on and off, ASCII commands must be sent to the microcontroller through a DB9 connection. In the motorcycle setup, the relay box has its own IDB box, and the commands are sent through the network from the embedded PC. When a button is pressed on the BikeRelay Project 54 GUI, C++ code interprets that particular button press, and sends the correct ASCII commands to the relay box. The microcontroller interprets these, and turns on or off the corresponding relays.

 Above: The relay box used for controlling the motorcycle lights at Project54

For more information on how relays work, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

Devin Mullen

            For the past one hundred or so years, the most common way to transmit electricity to homes and businesses has been through the use of electrical cables, and the extensive power grid that runs throughout the United States and the rest of the world.  As a result of recent research done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), that may change fairly soon.

             In the late 1800’s Nikola Tesla performed experiments to send large amounts of electricity through the air. Some of his experiments proved successful, although the efficiency rating for sending the electricity was very low.

Above: A Tesla Coil

             In 2006, MIT researchers developed a way to send electrical power with a much higher efficiency than Tesla was able to achieve. The theory behind this idea is resonance. Most FM and AM radios use resonance to tune in on a specific station; FM uses frequency modulation, tuning in on radio waves with different frequencies, and AM uses amplitude modulation, tuning in on radio waves with different amplitudes.  All radio waves carry some amount of power, which can be observed using a crystal AM radio, a radio that has no power source and uses only the power contained in the waves to power its circuit. When an inductor is used to transmit power (for example, in a transformer), the magnetic field that it produces is very weak, mainly because it sends a magnetic field in all directions, so it does not concentrate the field. This means that any device that is receiving the power must be within a very short distance of the inductor. An electric toothbrush uses this basic idea. Most rechargeable electric toothbrushes have an inductor in the charging base, and an inductor in the bottom of the toothbrush. The inductor in the charging base induces current in the inductor in the bottom of the toothbrush, and in turn charges the battery. This is called inductive coupling. For this method, the toothbrush must be very close to the charging base because inductive coupling is fairly inneficient, and only carries electricity over short distances.

Above: Inductive Coupling with a Rechargeable Toothbrush

             The idea behind this new form of wireless power transfer is based upon the theory of resonance and the circuitry of the common AM or FM radio. Every radio uses a basic tuning circuit, composed of a capacitor and an inductor. This circuitry allows the radio to tune in on certain frequencies by increasing or decreasing the inductance or capacitance in the circuit. Using this basic principle of the common radio, wireless power transfer can be made much more efficient. If you send power in frequencies, along radio waves, you can greatly improve the efficiency over inductive coupling. If you send power in the form of a radio wave, you are only sending it to certain receivers that are tuned to the specific frequency that the power transmitter is tuned to. This means that instead of sending these radio waves everywhere, (and wasting a lot of electricity) you can send power to a select few devices within a certain range, usually about two meters. This is beneficial more for in-home use, rather than widespread power transfer.

Above: Wireless Power transfer through Resonance      

              For long distance power transfer, microwaves (the form of electromagnetic radiation, not the kitchen appliance) are more sensible. Microwaves have a much longer range than normal radio waves and are therefore much more efficient in terms of wireless power transfer. The only major drawback with microwaves is that they aren’t entirely safe; microwaves contain high amounts of radiation, which could be a problem with radiation poisoning and cancer. Overall, you can expect the power grids to stay , but the ability to eliminate wires for common household devices is already here.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/wireless-power.htm

 Devin Mullen

We often use photo-sharing websites like Flickr, Picasa, Panoramio to show our friends our travel photos and interesting places. Many of these websites have the extra feature to geo-tag photos by placing them on a map (signifying the place they were taken). They also give kml feeds, which are files we can open in Google Earth and can actually see our photos.

“LIVE” TOUR USING GOOGLE EARTH

If you have a GPS enabled phone with a camera, you can show your friends photos almost immediately after you have clicked them on Google Earth. For that you will require a GPS-tagging app like GPS Today on your Phone and an account in Shozu linked to your account in Flickr. When you sign up for Shozu and install the app on your phone you can add sites like Flickr (you will have to authorize first) to which you can upload photos just after you have taken them. GPS today tags your photos with your current GPS coordinate. So, your friends just have to subscribe to your photostream kml feed, open with Google Earth and change the refresh in the file properties to a desirable value. This way your friends and family can actually track your adventure “live”.

EXTRA FEATURES YOU COULD IMPLEMENT

There are many other features which we can utilize in Google Earth besides just showing the location of the photograph:

1.     Orientation: We can also add the orientation tags like heading, tilt and roll to our photos specifying the direction in which the photo was taken. This becomes helpful when we have a lot of photos on one particular location and identifying them is a difficult task.

2.    TimeStamp: When people have a lot of photos for a small location it sometimes become untidy or confusing to see all the photos. In Google Earth the Time Slider creates a 4th dimension for viewing the photos. We can view photos over a user specified time interval which can be in seconds and even years. Here is a Yahoo Pipe (used to generate feeds for different websites) which gives the user the same kml feed which the Flickr provides, but adds the extra feature of TimeStamp and removes the limitation of 20 photos which the official Flickr feed has. You just have to give the user’s ID in the second field (e.g. - the ID of the user with the Flickr URL www.flickr.com/photos/31413502@N06/ is ID 31413502@N06) and after running the Pipe, select “Get as kml” option. (Sometimes it may not work the first time, try running the pipe a couple of times to make it work)

The photo below shows two pics taken almost at the same location but marked differently with orientation tag, and also showing a Timeline from the first pic to the second pic.

Do try these exiting features of Google Earth.

Ankit Singh

Yesterday Mark Taipan and I presented KLAS, or Kingsbury Location Awareness System at the Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering (ISE) Symposium for the 10th annual UNH Undergraduate Research Conference. We were able to share with the audience our project poster, our KLAS video, as well as have two PDAs on hand to provide user demos.

Here we see the KLAS URC presentation setup where both Mark and I are showing two interested engineers our project’s attributes.

This pictures (taken during one of our slower traffic moments) shows a little more of our presentation display.

Finally, we see both Mark (Left) and Myself (Right), standing next to our project poster.

In addition to these photos, we have posted many other pictures from this year’s URC here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eceblogger/sets/72157617236370816/

These pictures, as well as the ones above, were taken by Oskar Palinko. Thanks Oskar for capturing the event!

Overall this year’s URC was an excellent experience, and both Mark and I are proud to have been able to do the work to be involved!

Matthew Lape

Students from the UNH Tech Camp recently visited the Project54 lab. These students ranged from 7th to 12th grade, and all but two were from New Hampshire. The camp is aimed to give young interested students a glimpse of the engineering and science world. The students were given a brief background of how P54 came together and how the system works. Lastly the students got a chance to use the lab car and drive the simulator, the pictures below are from the UNH Tech Camp’s visit.

Here, Oszkar Palinko explains how the eye tracker software and the simulator are used at P54.

Here, I explain to a student how the touch screen and voice command can be used to control P54.

This was the first annual UNH Tech Camp and it was great to see such a large turn out. It is always a good experience when you get to work with young students so interested in engineering. I look forward to the visits from the UNH Tech Camp in the future.

David Garneau

The Essence of Engineering and Meta-Engineering: A Work in Progress aims to define what Engineering is and how it is different from Science. The following quote have caught my attention:

The history of science is a graveyard of theories that were empirically successful for a time…

The article includes many references and quotations. It’s interesting to read how people used to define Engineering.