Student project suggestions

Background

Rather than suggest particular projects, I much prefer to talk to people on an individual basis and try to find something that will be of mutual interest.

My current research interests are focussed around wireless sensor systems, pervasive systems (the IoT), control systems, robotics and autonomous systems, and security. However, I teach (or have taught) courses on control theory for robotics, wireless sensor systems, computer architecture using FPGAs, security, mobile systems, operating systems, networking, Linux internals, compilers, databases, distributed systems, etc.

In my group we build things, measure things, and analyse data. All my projects require two things - (i) a willingness to learn new things as necessary to finish the project, some of which might well be outside your comfort zone, and (ii) practical application, good testing and, in some cases, statistics on the data captured. In short, I enjoy supervising self-motivated people who want to do something useful and want to do it in a professional way.

I have almost no interest in web/database projects.

In general, in my group we build hardware for wireless sensor nodes or robots, we interface sensors to it, and we deploy this (i) on humans and animals, typically to measure behaviour and performance, and (ii) in both indoor and outdoor environments to measure anything from energy and water consumption to pollution levels. Once we have data, we undertake analysis on it and, where necessary, we invent new analytical techniques. The work involves building hardware, writing low level code to interface to sensors, data gathering, network protocols, security, and data analytics to name a few. The area has names that range from wireless sensor networking and pervasive computing to the Internet of Things. I have a separate interest in the use of technology in the education of schoolchildren.

Personal suggestions

Developing world

1. Design, build, and evaluate a cheap networked weather station for use in the developing world. Landslides (which kill more people globally than do rivers and flooding) are triggered either by seismic activity or by prolonged and/or intense rainfall. Having the ability to monitor this is therefore crucial in determining when land may be about to slip. I would like to deploy a significant number of such monitors through a local NGO in Kalimpong in west Bengal where landslides are a major problem for the local population but where rainfall conditions vary considerably over distances of several km. We will do tests in the UK on the weather stations so developed, comparing the results to commercial products. The project will involve 3D printing, some simple hardware design and construction, and software development - including firmware, networking code, and data upload to the cloud.
2. Design, build and evaluate a cheap networked seismometer for deployment in the developing world. Many volcanic eruptions are from volcanoes that are considered 'dormant', which are therefore not monitored. However, it might be possible to detect the early signs of awakening through low-level seismic activity - but the seismometers must be sensitive enough to detect this and cheap enough to deploy in significant numbers since there are many dormant volcanoes. Such a seismometer would have uses in the context of other natural hazards, such as landslides. As above, this will involve 3D printing, some simple hardware design and construction, and software development - including firmware, networking code, and data upload to the cloud.

Robots

1. Design, build and evaluate a robot for maintaining green walls - these are vertical structures full of plants that are becoming part of the green strategy of many urban workplaces. They have a tendency to dry out and need maintenance, which is tedious for humans, but could be easy for a robot that could move safely across the structure.
2. Design, build, and evaluate a cheap legged robot, along the lines of RHEX, but built using relatively cheap motors. The intention is to use this in schools to explore mechanics, control, and biology. Yet again, this project will involve making, some simple hardware design and construction, and software development - including firmware, and networking code.
3. Examine the effect of employing robots as part of children's play. Children from deprived backgrounds hear many fewer words during their development than people from more privileged backgrounds.
4. Extend the CRATES simulator (​https://bitbucket.org/asymingt/) to allow for the exploration of multi-UAV flocking, developing, in particular, network models for ROS, the Robot Operating System. In this project we will work with the designers of ROS and will seek to provide code of sufficient quality that it can be released as part of the latest ROS distribution.

Disability

1. Explore geographic routing algorithms for the ARCCS (Accessible Routes from Crowdsourced Cloud Services) research project. The aim of this project is to explore how best to advise wheelchair-bound individuals about how to get from A to B, given information about fixed hazards, surface type, slopes, cambers and the particular disability. This is primarily a programming/algorithmics project, but has the potential significantly to impact the lives of disabled people. This work is expected to lead to a publication.
2. Work on indoor localisation with a wheelchair basketball team: they would like to be able to track their players, figuring out how far individuals have travelled and whether their tactics are working. This would use both IMU sensors developed for the ARCCS project and time-of-flight based localisation techniques. The same localisation techniques could be applied to other projects - tracking individuals with dementia in a museum environment; and tracking children playing in a forest school.
3. Develop an augmented reality version of wheelchair tennis, in which the ball is virtual and the physics of its flight can be adapted to allow for different skill levels or different levels of disability. There would be haptic feedback in the racket so that individuals got a sense of how they had hit the ball.

Enabling tech

1. Determine the increase in accuracy obtained by placing multiple cheap accelerometers on a single board. This is a piece of research that involves some prototyping, some programming, and the development of algorithms that fuse together multiple sensor inputs. A knowledge of linear algebra would be a significant advantage.
2. Develop a cheap bat detector using an SPM0404UD5 (or similar) ultrasonic sensor coupled with FPGA and/or cheap computing hardware to explore whether it is possible to sample an analog signal at rates of upto 500kHz.
3. Build cheap camera tracking for an indoor UAV

Collaborative suggestions

Parasomnia (with Sofia Eriksson, Consultant Neurologist)

Non-REM (rapid eye movement) parasomnias are undesirable events from deep sleep such as sleep walking and night-terrors. These events are very common in childhood, affecting up to 20%, but as many as 2-3% of adults still have some type of non-REM parasomnia. Previously these events were thought to be mild with little impact on day to day life but more recent studies have shown that over 40% of patients with NREM parasomnia experience excessive daytime somnolence (Oudiette et al. 2009 and Afnulf et al. 2014). More frequent depressive and anxiety symptoms as well as reduced quality of life have also been seen in adult patients who sleep walking than in normal controls (Lopez et al. 2013). Non-REM parasomnias may also result in injury and injurious behaviour in up to half of the patients (Guilleminault et al. 1995 and Lopez et al. 2013). There are no licensed treatments for non-REM parasomnias and currently, patients with severe symptoms are treated with either Clonazepam (a long acting Benzodiazepine) or antidepressants. This practice is based on case series and there is need for a randomised controlled trial to evaluate efficacy and tolerability of the drugs used. One problem with such studies is that people do often not remember the next day if they have had any events during the night. This project therefore aims to develop a device that can detect night time events (such getting out of bed and walking or night- terrors where someone sits up abruptly in bed and may talk/shout) to enable objective measurements of numbers of events for comparisons between treatment groups.