Team Terminator’s new project focuses on developing a Chess playing robot that relies on camera inputs to identify a chess board and a mechanical arm to move the chess pieces and on machine learning principles for ideal victory paths for the robot. This project aims to cover various engineering fields and expose participants to long term research in addition to applied and collaborative engineering environments. While a robot that can play a game of chess on its own is the end goal, for this academic year, we will a robot which plays the game of Tic Tac Toe.  In subsequent years, we will gradually incorporate new features to achieve the end goal of building a robot which plays chess. The project will have mechanical, electrical, and programming aspects.  More and further more

The goal of this project is to turn a hybrid General Motors EV 1 into an self-driving electric car.  More and further more

Presentation on the project

2018 Goals: Students will design and build a COTS based autonomous wheeled platform with Bang Bang control, PID controller, and sensor arrays (IR Rangers, Scanless Lidars), using DSPACE and HIL (hardware in the loop). Final product must be capable of autonomous navigation and establish a baseline for FPGA-based implementation.

The goal of this project is to build a high sensitive condenser microphone by using a nano-thin graphene-polymer composite membrane. Conventional condenser microphones make use of polymer-metal composite as a sensing medium which has tens of micron thickness. In this research, nano-thin UV curable polymer layer will be used together with multi-layer graphene membrane as a sensing medium. The nano-think UV curable polymer film provides toughness to the composite membrane. And the graphene layer serves as a water and gas barrier for the polymer layer while providing the electrical conductivity to the membrane. The size of the proposed microphone is significantly smaller than that of conventional condenser microphones due to its nano-thin composite membrane. And the microphone has long term stability and high sensitivity exploiting the unique characteristics of the UV curable polymer (i.e. very low elastic modulus: 56 MPa) and the graphene layer (i.e. excellent water and gas barrier). The proposed microphone will be built directly on a printed circuit board (PCB) for the simplicity of sensor configuration. The final goal is to develop a prototype and to present in conferneces.