Low Budget Oscilloscope with Graphical LCD Display:

An accurate and simple graphical oscilloscope using a PIC18F2550 microcontroller and an AGM1264F graphical LCD has been constructed using the PIC18F2550 GLCD Text Test as basis. It has the capability of measuring the maximum voltage, peak-to-peak voltage, average voltage, minimum voltage, and the zero-crossing frequency for a DC signal over 100 samples. To capture on rise or fall, the oscilloscope has a built-in edge trigger function that can be set.
Using the change Time Division function, the time scale for the display is variable and can be easily redefined while the voltage range can be changed to 0-5V, 0-2.5V, and 0-1.25V. The relatively slow acquisition time and sampling rate is the main limitations of this oscilloscope due to the fact that the inputs are limited by the constraints of the internal ADC.
A 9V battery is used as the power supply along with a high-accuracy low drop-out linear voltage regulator to provide a stable 5V supply for the microcontroller and the graphical LCD. The power spikes/ripples are prevented by capacitor.

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Oscilloscope Project.rar

Thesis on IMPLEMENTING A ROBUST 3-DIMENSIONAL EGOCENTRIC NAVIGATION SYSTEM

Robot Navigation is a large component of current robotics research. In this paper, a method to implement the “go-to-goal” aspect of navigation is discussed. Specifically, I will first discuss a method called Egocentric Navigation, which was developed at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Intelligent Systems. Then improvements toward making the system more accurate and efficient will be proposed. Finally, the experimental and simulation results of this new Egocentric Navigational system follow. In total, this paper will lay out a complete system for implementation on a robot which will accomplish navigation to goal in a landmark-based “egocentric” manner.

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ROBUST 3-DIMENSIONAL EGOCENTRIC NAVIGATION SYSTEM.Pdf

Using Robotic Hand Technology for the Rehabilitation of Recovering Stroke Patients with Loss of Hand Power

Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Nearly 700,000 people suffered from stroke last year and two thirds of them survived but were left with any number of disabilities, one such disability is upper extremity paraplegia. If the hand and arm doesn't have therapy immediately after stroke, it will lose it power and muscle control, resulting in a claw like appearance and loss of function. Activities of the patient daily living will be significantly effected. Current therapy on the affected limb in the hospital is expensive and difficult to manage due to the limited amount of resources compared to the number of patients. We introduce a pneumatic actuated wearable hand and forearm device in this thesis. It is designed according to the hand and arm kinematics. It can help the patients keep power on each finger and help maintain the coordination of different fingers to achieve daily living movements. It consists of forearm brace, rehabilitation glove and artificial muscles. The custom made artificial muscles also known as McKinney Artificial Muscles are used in antagonistic pairs to control the fingers flexing and extension. The rehabilitation device is small, lightweight, home-based, and has large force capabilities. It is also affordable to the patients due to the specially designed low-cost artificial muscles. The rehabilitation device was controlled by solenoid valves in conjunction with a Mitsubishi M32/83C 16-bit micro controller. Experiments on the pneumatic elbow brace have shown that it is capable of moving each finger from full extension to flexing, to perform actions like pinching and allows the coordinated movement of two fingers.

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Robotic Hand Technology.pdf

Thesis On Space-Time Coding for Large Antenna Arrays

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems can greatly improve the capacity and performance of wireless communications. In particular, space-time coding techniques have received much attention in recent years as an efficient approach to achieving the performance gains offered by MIMO channels. Thus far, most work on space-time coding has focused on systems with small antenna arrays or high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), for which it has been shown that codes should be designed according to the rank and determinant criteria. For such scenarios, coherent space-time coding and differential space-time modulation (DSTM) schemes have been designed, for systems with or without channel knowledge at the receiver, respectively. In recent years, there has been some work on coherent space-time coding for large arrays, which indicates that the code design metric should be chosen diffently from that for small arrays. In this dissertation, we study the design of space-time coding for large arrays. We focus on three aspects: performance analysis, code construction and decoding algorithms. We first analyze the asymptotic performance of differential space-time modulation. A new upper bound on the pairwise-error probability is derived for large arrays. This bound suggests that Euclidean distance is an appropriate design criterion for DSTM with large numbers of antennas, which is similar to the design of coherent space-time coding for the large-array regime. For two transmit antennas and four or more receive antennas, we use the new design criterion to obtain several new unitary codes with large minimum Euclidean distance. The proposed codes outperform some existing codes, for example, the well-known Alamouti code, for large receive arrays.

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Space-Time Coding for Large Antenna.pdf