Computer Engineering

Capstone Design Projects

 

All Union Computer Engineering students complete a capstone design project to pull together the fundamental skills and knowledge they gain from their core courses and apply them to a long-term project. Students gain experience with background research, project scheduling, design, analysis, testing, oral presentations, and  technical writing in this year-long course. Some students tend to focus on the software side of Computer Engineering in their projects, others on hardware. And most of them work on projects that use both sets of skills. 

Capstone projects in Engineering can take on many forms. Some students work on projects provided by a local company such as General Electric or IBM. Others work on projects associated with faculty research. Still others take advantage of our international projects (IVDS) where students form teams with students in Turkey to design a device for a competition. And some create their own dream projects...

The following projects highlight the diversity of topics:

S.L.O.T.H. - Software Loaded On The Hardware - a complete console type video game.The game system functions similarly to those on the market now and makes use of a compact disc reader and controller. The controller is wireless and uses radio frequencies to control game operations. At the heart of the system is a single board PC/104 386 computer. The software for the system is coded in C++ using a graphics library and the standard C++ library. The software is divided into three main areas containing the game, a data handling system, and a booting system.

Mike Cizenski, EE 2001
Francisco Grullon, CSE 2001
Autonomous Underwater Vehicle - a small submersible vehicle designed to assist in a Geology research project by finding the source of springs in a lake. 

Derrick Rapp, CSE 2000
Anonymous Robot Tag - a group of four robots featuring FirstStep Basic Stamp boards, lights and sensors, speakers and microphones, that cooperate to play the game of tag. It is "anonymous robot tag" because the robots don't know which robot is it until they get tagged by the "it" robot. The robots run two algorithms, one for "not it" behavior where they avoid lights on other robots using the light sensors, and one for "it" behavior where they chase the lights on the  other robots. When the bumper switches indicate a "tag", they use the speakers and microphone to communicate with a single tone to determine if the "tag" is with an "it" robot or with something else. 

Cregg Brown, CSE 2000 
International Virtual Design Studio - an annual project in cooperation with the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. The 2000-2001 competition devices traversed the beam shown without using any wheels, and dropped the appropriate number of ping pong balls into baskets when they sensed sources of heat, light and wind. 

2000-2001 Students:
Phil Leef, CSE
Seth Serviss, CSE
Scott Schrum, CS
Ross Guida, CS
CheXpert - a system that plays checkers with a human player. It contains a Motorola microprocessor that is programmed to search for the best move to make against the human opponent. It has circuits that use light sensors to detect the placement of each side's pieces and lights to signal its opponent to move the pieces. The playing board was designed and built for the project, and the program uses artificial-intelligence algorithms to choose its moves. The system can regularly defeat both its builder and his project advisor. 

Pat Clas, CSE 2000
Distributing a Computational Fluid Dynamics Problem -This project coordinates the parallel computation of a turbine-blade fluid dynamics problem for General Electric. It spawns one master and several slave processes that analyze and share data for every blade row. Students showed that the parallelization of this analysis is possible through socket communications. This parallelization significantly decreased the execution time for the analysis of an entire turbine.

Matthew Abrams, CSE 2001
Stephen McManus, CS 2001

 

 

 

 


 Two-Dimensional Image Filter Design for Multiplierless Implementation Using Genetic Algorithms
In today’s fast-paced society, effective real-time processing technology is expected and therefore arguably essential. The rapid growth and prevalence of digital multimedia has driven the development of associated technologies. Modern signal and image processing applications demand significant levels of computation, many of which are too complex for practical implementation using software alone. This project used a unique genetic algorithm to optimize filter coefficients such that the corresponding filter’s frequency response matches that of an ideal system with the constraint that all coefficients are powers-of-two. The motivation for using power-of-two filter coefficients is to reduce the overall arithmetic complexity in any hardware based implementation by replacing digital multipliers with simpler shift operators.

Christopher D. Roblee, CpE 2003
Douglas J. Lockett, EE 2003

All Past Projects:

Class of 2003 Computer Engineering Projects:

Christopher D. Roblee (with Douglas J. Lockett (EE)) - Two-Dimensional Image Filter Design for Multiplierless Implementation Using Genetic Algorithms
Jennifer Martin and Lynn Van Buren - Palm Battleship Game
Albert M Sheldon IV - A Card Game Called Michigan

Class of 2002 Computer Engineering Projects:

Dipu Basnet - LPC-based Speech Recognition
Michael Genadri - Customer Assistant
Atsunobu Kaneko - Psychology Department Preregistration Software
Francesco Quierolo - Generic Agent and Instruction Toolkit
Vikramjit Sangha - Workstation Dump Viewer
Andrew Stone - Reconfiguration of a Cluster Tool Used in Semiconductor Processing

Class of 2001 Computer Engineering Projects:

Matt Abrams (with Steve McManus)- Distributing a Computational Fluid Dynamics Problem for General Electric
Mahir Aydin - Porting Linux applications to IBM S/390 mainframe
Francisco Grullon - S.L.O.T.H. Software Loaded On the Hardware
Phillip Leef, Seth Serviss -  International Virtual Design Studio
Damon Carr -  Water Sampler Controller for Geology Research

Class of 2000 Computer Engineering Projects:

Derrick Rapp - Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
Cregg Brown - Anonymous Robot Tag
David Oakley - Speech Recognition System
Rob Hoppenfeld - Water Level Monitor for Mohawk River Flood Control
Pat Clas - CheXpert Checkers Player
Saif Madar - Data Acquisition System for Mechanical Engineering Research
David Smith - Web-controlled Mapping Robot
George Powers -  International Virtual Design Studio
Nikhil Sudan - Web Database Course Scheduler

Class of 1999 Computer Engineering Projects:

Barry Baker, Bianca Prumo, Bill Desrochers, Dan Feldman - International Virtual Design Studio
Scott Sawyer - MPI Message Passing Performance

Class of 1998 Computer Engineering Projects:

Socrates Castillo - Navigation for Robot Soccer Game
Talet Meraj - Microprocessor Based Motor Controller
Ignacio Delgado

Class of 1997 Computer Engineering Projects:

Jeremy  Decker - Data Acquisition and Display for Soliton Investigation
John  Burchett - Autonomous Vehicle
Tom Wesley Reid III - Power System Controller
Craig W. Beckerleg - Online Student Directory