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Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Electro-Optics Program |
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Russell C. Hardie |
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Projects Lab KL351A |
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The Projects Lab in KL351A is currently equipped with a slot car track and camera. This equipment has been used to support an innovative design project that combines students and topics from ECE445 Signal Processing and ECE447 Digital Control Systems. In this project, students joined forced to design an automated slot car system. Slot cars are electrically powered model cars that ride in a slot in a track and are usually controlled with a hand held speed controller. For the project, MATLAB based computer vision is used to provide positional and velocity information for the cars using a live webcam. A MATLAB based control system is then used to autonomously control the speed and position of the car (NO human in the loop). The entire system is integrated using MATLAB SIMULINK and runs in soft real-time at 10 frames per second. The system is now fully operational and set up in KL351A. The cars can maintain any specified speed profile and can be set so that one car matches the speed of the other. This problem has relevance to new “smart” highway concepts and involves control systems as well as signal and image processing. This novel joint class project is the brain child of Dr. Russell Hardie (ECE445) and Dr. Raul Ordonez (ECE447). |
