ODCSSS had 17 students in 2006 who selected from a list of 34 project proposals, as submitted by research investigators from both UCD and DCU. These projects were clustered in 4 themes of "Speech and Language Processing, Imaging and Visualisation, Pervasive Computing and Software Engineering".
Rationale:
Environmental sensing is increasingly important, with worries about pollution, climate change and its effects on wildlife. Sensor networks allow us to place sensors in the environment and relay observations back to base for use on the internet, in simulations and other applications.
For best results observations need to be made over a wide area over long period of time, and this poses two problems: how do we cover the area of interest without at a reasonable cost, and how do we power the sensors over their lifetime?
For aquatic environments, an answer to both questions is to deploy sensors on yachts. A yacht can sail around, allowing it to report on a larger area than a fixed sensor; it can also move using the wind, and can generate power using an impeller in the water or solar cells on the sails.
So far so good, but if we want yachts to act as sensors we have to be able to sail them in predictable ways, guiding them to explore the areas we're interested in, and avoid obstacles -- all without direct human intervention.
The project:
This project will demonstrate the idea of a yacht-based wireless sensor network for an aquatic environment. We will develop a computer-based control system for a radio-controlled model yacht, that encodes the operations yachts use to manoevre (reach cross the wind, tack into the wind and so on). We will look at tactics we can use to cover a given area, and demonstrate the project working on a local lake. We may also look at multiple yachts acting as a swarm, at sailing tat adapts to changes in conditions, and other issues.
The student:
To conduct this project you will need to be happy working at with low-level software, using Java and possibly some C/C++. The project also involves interfacing computer control to off-the-shelf radio control hardware, and developing control algorithms from descriptions off the web.
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