Improving quality of life through innovative engineering highlighted Poster Symposium presentations at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.
A team of Intelligent Systems Engineering students with bio-engineering concentrations displayed their Electromyography-controlled exoskeletal arm brace. The device allows a paralyzed person to move a braced arm.
Their VispalExo Exoskeleton Arm brace was one of six hour-long Capstone Design Final Presentations as part of the symposium, which also featured posters from a variety of engineering and informatics classes, along with Serve IT, which applies the technological skills of undergraduate students to help local nonprofit organizations better serve their missions.
Mary Loveless, Luddy faculty lecturer, said the symposium “allowed students to showcase the cutting-edge research all our labs are doing, and also within the curriculum.
“This was a great opportunity for our students to communicate their science and engineering knowledge. They are showing the techniques and the engineer design cycle through real-world projects within our classes.”
Projects ranged from those done as part of a class to undergraduate research to extracurricular opportunities. Titles included “Hoosier Health,” “Innovation Infrastructure – B-Town Transit,” “Gas and Turbine Power Production Emissions and their Future,” and “Cancer Stem Cell Hypothesis in PhysiCell.”
“There is a lot of incredible student output at the undergraduate level within Luddy,” Loveless said. “There are a lot of output events happening. This was a pilot attempt to bring many capstones in informatics and engineering and other project-based classes together for a culminating output.”
The exoskeleton arm brace, developed by Isaac Hudson, Anna Seraiah, Josiah Phillips, Natalie Hartman and Grant Maxey, takes electromyography data from the bicep and triceps muscles to control a motor that moves the arm.
Hudson said they tried to improve upon the work of a previous team. They used a machine learning model to analyze the electrical activity generated from bicep and triceps muscles and then predict, “based on those signals if you’re in an extension or flexion orientation.”
In other words, the device will determine if a person wants to move the arm up or down, then move it accordingly.
“A paralyzed individual will still generate some muscle activity,” he said. “We utilize their remaining muscle activity to actuate a motor to control their arm.”
Hartman said the model demonstrates “100 percent accuracy between flexion and extension.”
April’s solar eclipse provided unique research and learning opportunities highlighted by another engineering presentation. The IUBSat team of ISE seniors Will Brenneke, Annabel Brinker,Joseph Patus, Gourav Pullela, Lucas Snyder, and Caleb Vrydaghs, under the direction of Daniel Loveless, associate professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering, launched a helium-filled high-altitude balloon with a small satellite payload that reached a height of 112,000 feet to take photographs of the event.
The balloon was launched near Bloomington and landed about 100 miles east of Columbus, Ohio. Students tracked and retrieved it.
Brenneke said the real-world project provided invaluable insight into collaboration, problem solving and adapting to unexpected problems.
One problem was not filling the balloon with enough helium, which slowed its ascent. That resulted in it getting caught in the jet stream and being carried far beyond western Ohio projections.
Still, Brenneke said, “We loved the opportunity. Dr. Loveless was a great help to us.”
A unique musical experience was displayed by the Interactive Piano Alley team. ISE majors Keith Soruco, Erin Seliger, Omair Alhajeri and Noah Probst developed an interactive piano that created a sound while stepping on the keys.
A future goal, Soruco said, was developing more interactive features such as a bench that would generate a sound or music or even a speech by sitting on it.
Another engineering project, “Autonomous Driving and the PIC Control Scheme,” aimed to design an autonomous vehicle that could tow a sled.
Matthew Brown, an ISE junior, said the biggest challenge in the semester-long project was in developing two versions -- one with a camera and one with a sensor.
“The sensor was very vulnerable to sunlight,” he said. “The camera was vulnerable to distance. After a certain distance, it had a hard time finding the QR code and following the traceable.”
Other team members were fellow ISE majors Julian Camacho and Joseph Thompson.
The symposium demonstrated that Luddy’s Intelligent Systems Engineering program is at the forefront of technological advancement, including artificial intelligence. Mary Loveless said students explore how machine learning intersects with intelligent systems, which can lead to diverse applications, including cancer modeling and developing machine learning algorithms as services on platforms such as cloud services, mobile apps, web applications and even embedded systems.
“We’re trying to bring this awareness that engineering is at IU and that our students are producing exciting and amazing things,” Loveless said.
“One of the initiatives from the university is to improve project-based learning. Engineering is exactly that. Our entire curriculum has project-based learning interwoven within it.”