Contents
- Project Title:Robot Navigation of an Unfamiliar Terrain
- Abstract: Disasters, wheter natural or man made, cause tremendous damage to societies, often resulting in loss of life and millions of dollars in damage. According to reports published by the Red Cross a total of 39,073 people were reported killed by disasters in 2001, with earthquakes proving to be the worlds’s deadliest disasters, accounting for over half the year’s toll. In earthquake disaster areas rescue efforts can be painfully slow, as debris is to be carefully removed. A Robot operated from a safe distance would be beneficial in surveying earthquake disaster areas. Locating victims quickly and efficiently would aid in the rescue efforts of those victims. This project is about the design and implementation of a motion control of such a robot.
- Faculty advisor(s): Shawki Areibi/Medhat Moussa
- Students:
- Roberto Battiston
- Serge Crainic
- Timothy Hamm
- Phil Munroe
vice Control Via Powerline Communication (Winter 2003)
- Project Title: Device Communication Via Powerline Systems
- Abstract: Device communication within the home has traditionally been accomplished via additional cabling: coax, cat5, etc. This adds great expense and complications to those homes not already outfitted with these communication mediums. Our project entails communication over the existing powerline infrastructure in order to control, schedule and monitor household devices. This user control will be expanded to facilitate remote communication over the Internet. The prototype device is a standard household 110V wall socket, whose states can be controlled, scheduled and monitored, both locally and remotely via a web page.
- Faculty advisor(s): Shawki Areibi
- Students:
- Rob Danford
- Paul Wighton
The High Speed PCI Connector (HSPC) (Fall 2002)
- Project Title: The High Speed PCI Connector (HSPC)
- Abstract: The biggest cause of low performance in computer systems is the time it takes to execute I/O and memory functions from peripheral devices such as LAN, modems and SCSI. One approach to solve this problem has been the movement of peripheral devices from lower to higher performance buses. The PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) is the latest bus architecture and is quickly becoming the standard. Until recently the 32 bit, 33 MHz, 5V compliant expansion slot was the implementation favoured by most PC vendors. In certain recent PC configurations the PCI slot have migrated to a wider bus (64 bits) and faster configurations (66 MHz), although some configurations don’t implement both features. The PCI bus will only run at the speed and width of the slowest PCI card attached to the bus. A slow card will create a bottleneck in the system and can drastically reduce the PCI effectiveness.
The HSPC (High Speed PCI Connector) is a circuit board which will enable devices such as LAN cards or custom devices, such as cards connecting slot machines to a database, to hook up to the 66 MHz/64 bit PCI bus. This will enable these devices to have a higher rate of data transfer with the computer. - Faculty advisor(s): Shawki Areibi/Medhat Moussa
- Students:
- Greg Callow
- Patrick O’Keefe
Object Tracking System Through Sensor Fusion (Winter 2002)
- Project Title: Object Tracking System Through Sensor Fusion
- Abstract: Recent advancements in sensor fusion, miniaturization, and low powered electrical products have lead to the ability to design and create devices that were once only dreamed of. Such products as the global positioning system (GPS) and virtual reality gesture recognition systems are examples of these new advances. Between these products there remains a need for a miday tracking device, a system that tracks the position of an object to within centimeters rather than millimeters or meters, in a closed area rather than a global open space. It has been proposed that an object tracking system be designed in order to fill this gap in position tracking. This system will collect data on the position of an object, process the data, and then aim a pointing device at the object. For the purpose of producing a prototype the tracker device will be a pin spotlight with accurate azimuth and pitch control motors, which will track a small sensor.
- Faculty advisor(s): Shawki Areibi
- Students:
- Rudi Meyenburg
- Ben Millen
Managerable 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Tap Device (Winter 2002)
- Project Title: Managerable 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Tap Device
- Abstract: The need for listen-only Ethernet stems from the practices of “packet sniffing, or passivley recording all the data-traffic passing through a specific point on a network. Most good network administrators do some form of packet sniffing regularly for the multiple purposes, such as intrusion detection, traffic analysis, password auditing and bandwidth analysis. All these activities provide the administrator with a wealth of useful information, however should a computer containing such information be compromised by an attacker, this same information will be invaluable to that attacker’s effort to further intrude on the network. The most common solution to this problem is to deply these monitoring systems in listen-only mode: they have the ability to remotely capture traffic, but cannot send traffic of their own.
Due to the nature of software, it will always be vulnerable, in one way or another to attacks or configuration problems. Since hardware is much more difficult to affect over the internet/network, this project will turn a computers two-way connnection to a network into a recieve only connection using hardware. - Faculty advisor(s): Shawki Areibi
- Students:
- Dan Bergeron
- Dave Rule
- Matthyw Thomas
- Tom Wu
USB Connected Environmental Data Logger (Winter 2002)
- Project Title: USB Conncted Environmental Data Logger
- Abstract: Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are complex arrangements of air quality management equipment and air ducts, designed to provide an optimal environment for the people living and working in large buildings. A properly designed and balanced system will ensure that the levels of temperature, humidity, fresh air, and pollutants such as dust are kept within a acceptable range throughout the building, while simultaneously minimizing the amount of energy used in doing so. Existing HVAC balancing methods are based on three basic tasks that are performed iteratively: Testing, Adjusting and Balancing (TAB). The problems associated with this process are that it requires considerable man power, it is complex, and it is highly empirical. These translate directly into high costs and poor accuracy. Furthermore, an improperly balanced system can result in poor energy efficiency and therefore unnecessary costs. The USB Connected Environmental Data Logger is a design to create a tool that will instrument the process and allow for the application of analytical modeling techniques.
- Faculty advisor(s): Shawki Areibi
- Students:
- Colin Peart
- Graham Knap
- Thiru Vimalan
Wireless Parking Lot Data Collection System (Winter 2002)
- Project Title: Wireless Parking Lot Data Collection System
- Abstract: In Toronto alone over one million cars hit the street every day. Of those million, it is reasonable to assume that almost all of them will need a place to work. Most traditional parking lots are run with a paid attendatn, toll booth, pre-paid tag system, or with no monitoring at all. Although these systems may cover some of the financial aspects of parking lot management, they do little to provide up to the minute, accurate parking lot data. The objective of this project was to develop a parking lot data collection system that allows users and administrators to easily and quickly view parking lot statistical data so that it may be analyzed for efficient lot management and design.
- Faculty advisor(s): Shawki Areibi
- Students:
- Mike Kay
- Mike Sewell
- Andrew Barker
Voice Operated Remote Control System (Fall 2001)
- Computer technology is always changing. A few of the current trends in this technology are wireless communication, voice recognition and signal processing for embedded systems. The problem lies in the integration of an entire system that encapsulates voice recognition, signal processing, wireless communication and microcomputer interfacing. The Voice Operated Remote Controlled Device Design Project comprises of implementation strategies, design specifications, component testing, system integration and assembly to produce two stages of a final design.
- Initial Report (PDF)
- Interim Report (PDF)
- Final Report (PDF)
- Video Clip (mpg)
- Advisor: Shawki Areibi
- Students:
- Victor Haramina
- Siva Kulasigam
Reservation System Using Multi Agent Systems (Winter 2001)
- Intelligent agent technology is still in the budding stages of becoming a viable resource to a wide array of people. They can perform searches geared to the person using the agent, but more importantly they can learn on every return to the user how to improve their searching to return only useful data to the user. In this context, an intelligent agent in the travel industry could greatly reduce search time for anybody. The agent could actually replace the travel agents of today. Based on the teaching and past history the agent has collected on the user, it would begin to return more and more useful travel tips for the user. This design will encompass the agent into route building for road travellers. This is important to clarify as the scope can easily grow beyond the time constraints of the semester. The data set will have to be created to hold all the possible routes and based on the input from the user, the route can be planned by the agent. A web-based interface will be developed using statistical analysis of past uses to determine new routes. Visual Basic will be used to program the agent and an average person relationship will be used for teaching.
- Initial Report (PDF)
- Interim Report (PDF)
- Final Report (PDF)
- Advisor: Shawki Areibi
- Students:
- Cam Church
- Mike Minogue