[Sci-all-l] Physics and Astronomy Student Colloquium: Part 3

[Scott Fleming]

Part 3 of the Vassar College Physics and Astronomy Student Colloquium will
be held on Monday, September 27 at 4:00 PM in Sanders Physics Lecture
Hall, Room 207.  Tea and cookies will be served before the talks.  All are
welcome to come and hear about the exciting research performed by Vassar
College students over the summer.  Part 3 will feature talks by Crystal
Bertoncini and Andy Fiss:




Crystal Bertoncini, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia
Title: "Ectobots"

Abstract: None of the robots commercially available today effectively use
sensors to navigate their environment.  Instead of the algorithms
and bumpers for obstacle avoidance currently employed, navigation
by sensors would be more efficient.  In order to create a robot
capable of navigating independently, the robot must be able to
distinguish between different classes of objects.  The current
goal is to write a program that will allow the robot rWilliam to
distinguish between bushes and ivy-covered brick walls using
ultrasound sensors, which will be added to a library of
differentiating programs that rWilliam can employ for
decision-making.  In order to do this, several different
mathematical methods are applied to scans of bushes and ivy-brick
walls.  Filtering, rectifying, and enveloping is performed on the
data.  Average peak height is the differentiating factor, and so
the average peak height of the rectified data was calculated.  A
fourth-order polynomial fit was applied to the average peak
height, and the radius of the even and odd coefficients was
graphed versus each other.  A separation between bushes and
ivy-brick walls is apparent.  More scans of bushes and ivy-brick
walls would strengthen the results.



Andy Fiss, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida
Title: "Ultrasonic Beam-forming with the Genetic Algorithm"
Abstract: We used Genetic Algorithm optimization of sparse array
parameters to produce an ultrasonic beam with a higher, narrower main-lobe
and lower side-lobes.  The solutions obtained were shown to be neither
unique nor trivial.