Applied Control and Sensor Fusion, Graduate Course

General Information

During the course you should carry out a project (1-3 students in each team). The main purpose of these projects is to get some knowledge about how to implement control and sensor fusion methods. This can be useful in your future career and as supervisor in our project course. Hopefully, some of the projects will produce fruitful ideas for new research and demo platforms.

Course presentation given as Monday micro 2010-05-03.

Organization and Examination

This course gives 6 hp. The course is mainly a (practical) self study course with large freedom for the participants to organize their work hours. During the course, the students should perform a well-documented project of their own and create a small exercise for the other course participants.

Timetable

Date	Action
May 17	Sign up for a project.
June 14	Project proposal are due.
September 15	Final reports and exercise for others to do. Brief presentation around this date.
October 15	Exercise in other projects done.

Brief description of the steps mentioned above.

• Project Proposal: The report should explain the project background, the idea and how the work will be carried out. Upper page limit: 2.
• Final Report and exercise for others: The final project report should be a manual describing what is done so that someone else can continue from your work. A simple exercise for the other course participants using your hardware should be created. It should be designed to take one day to solve.
• Final Presentation: The presentation will give each team 15 min. for presentation and 5 min. for discussion.

Project Ideas

Here is a very brief list of ideas on projects that could be performed within the course. Own ideas are most appreciated!

• LEGO Segway Robot: This project includes control and state estimation using IMU and/or light sensor. The platform proposed is from LEGO Mindstorm. There are two different approaches to the problem. For light sensor based solution, see this webpage and Youtube clip. For a gyro based solution, see this webpage and Youtube clip.
• LEGO Car with Electronic Stability Program: This project features control of the individual motors on the wheels of a LEGO car to stabilize it during maneuvers, see video on Youtube.
• Aircraft Waypoint Navigation: An ultra light model airplane has been built and is residing in our lab. The airplane is rather self stable and should be controlled using only GPS as sensor. The flight controller proposed is the Arduino ArduPilot.
• Tracking Applet for iPhone: OpenCV can easily be compiled for the iPhone, see this webpage. In this project, we want to track our Pioneer robot (which has a checkerboard) using the iPhone. The Pioneer robot should then be controlled to keep a relative distance to the iPhone. For some inspiration, see this clip.
• DSP and Microcontroller Programming: The dsPIC platform from Microchip allows advanced signal processing to be made on a small microchip. The development board that is proposed for this project is especially suitable for audio processing. See this Microchip webpage for more information.