This year, I originally proposed to work on "Vision Systems and Campus Automation", with a specific focus on "Classroom Attendance and Intra-campus Transport". I was forced to abandon the transportation side of the project early in the year, when it became clear that the cost of maintaining autonomous golf carts, as well as dealing with the liability associated with autonomous vehicles, was infeasible.
However, I completed a prototype of the campus attendance vision system, and I have plans to continue the project into next year, with a distributed cloud computing solution that may allow full-scale implementation. I did not collaborate with any other students on this project; however, I have left a great deal of documentation and continuation potential for any student who wants to use the OpenCV vision library, and next year I will be working with the Amazon Web Services program Rekognition, for which I will also provide documentation for the ease of use of the next generation of ISR students. Were I to describe this project to someone without any advance knowledge, I would point out specifically the challenges of managing the memory requirements for a large group of people to be recognized. I am very proud of being able to mesh the several different technologies required for the project - from the actual vision system Python libraries, to the MySQL database of users, to the Phidget RFID reader and the webcam - to work as a cohesive whole. I think that I would like to have learned about programs like Rekognition earlier, so that I could have finished a more complete prototype by this point; cloud computing seems like an obvious solution, looking back.
Additionally, I added a new project to the scope of my work that was not included in my initial proposal - creating a hydroponic sensor system to monitor the vital statistics of the plants in the hydroponic column, including electrical conductivity, pH, and temperature. In this project, I collaborated with Sameer Maragh, Sneha Nair, Joshua Bramwell-Butcher, and Minh Truong. This project leaves a very obvious legacy for others in the form of the garden that we have engineered - and my specific contribution to it, the sensor system, which is a platform that can easily be duplicated and built upon by other people, adding more sensors and creating identical systems to service other hydroponic implementations. Next year, I will do exactly that, as we expand the hydroponics program at the Energy Lab. Were I to describe this project, I would focus on the scientific knowledge that I obtained working on the project, such as the concept of nutrient levels in water being described by the electrical conductivity, and the composition of plants determining their ideal range of EC and pH. The greatest challenge in this project was probably creating a sensor system robust enough to survive outside in a wet environment - my previous projects in this class have needed no such hardening of the systems. Were I to do it again, I would have payed more attention to the failings of the system - if I had introduced warning protocols earlier, Dr. Bill would have been notified of the unsafe EC levels on Sunday the 14th, the day many of the plants in the column wilted. 
grayson_o
Comments