Looking for some senior design project ideas...

I am about to start my last year in Electrical Engineering as well as brainstorming of senior design projects. This is for my University and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions, ideas, or particular areas of study that would be most beneficial when choosing my final senior design project.

There are no restrictions and I just need some help determining if a communications project would be good, or RFID, or Controls, or Robotic, ect...

Any Ideas or suggestions will be appreciated..

Thanks!

 

A segway 2-wheeled balancer is always a cool thing to pick...there were 2 groups this year that picked a smart-thermostat...that was a bit boring. Its mostly a control project. My program is stretched out an extra year so I got an extra year to try and come up with neat but practical ideas myself.

You could always make a maze follower or a navigation-oriented robot to test dead-reckoning or novel obstacle avoidance sensor concepts. Although you would probably have to focus on achieving only one of the 2 objectives. With dead-reckoning, probably you will not be able to make the sensors yourselves and instead focus on sensor fusion- integrating and interpreting the all the data from all the sensors as a whole in an effective way. In the case of obstacle avoidance it would probably be best if you picked one method, built it up yourself and test it out. You probably don't even need a moving platform (time and cost constraint) unless you already have one handy (its always cool to see it do something in practice rather than just give back readings).

The dead-reckoning idea can get expensive because you probably can't build those types of sensors yourself. So it would be a false premise to base your entire project around that one sensor which you bought. So instead you have to focus using many different store-bought sensors and center your project around the interpretation of all the data. That can get costly, although Memsic accelerometer chips are dirt cheap, but gyros always get expensive very quickly, even the hobby RC helicopter ones.

I guess you could always build your own intertial sensors...but they have to be very accurate or you will get dismally poor performance in dead-reckoning. Memsic chips are dirt cheap though, so measuring linear acceleration is almost never a problem...angular movement with gyros are a different story.

You could try a lawnmower or a vacuum robot or something. Or some speech-activated control device.

You can probably see that I tend to steer towards robotics rather than consumer products. What budget do you have (Or they have alotted for you)?

 

http://www.electro-tech-online.com/e...control-2.html

This may interest you.
Another idea , for Robotics would be a Pipe Crawler communication system. What if the Crawler is inside a metal pipe?

 

A morse code thumper perhaps.

 

I really appreciate the ideas so far, keep them coming. I am leaning towards robotics and from some of the suggestions it seems as if this is a good direction. Thanks for the advise and I will keep researching and reading your helpful posts.

 

A group of vehicles that successively follow each other with the leader being controlled by a human (remotely or otherwise).

 

mesh communications stuff. this is pretty cutting edge. zigbee is the first example but look up tinyos. I think mesh based communications is going to be very big. Current applications are wireless sensor systems but I think there is a lot of potential in home and building automation, security systems, material tracking, plant automation and a host of others.

the cool thing about tinyos is that it is open source and the reference design uses inexpensive chipcon transceivers.

I'm trying to get the time to play with this stuff.

Phil

 

I will look more into mesh communication as well... Thanks and I will keep you guys posted...