Provost Bud Peterson was presented with a $100,000 check from BAE Systems at a test launch of a blimp that will be used in future Laboratory Introduction to Embedded Control classes. School of Engineering Dean William Baeslack, students, and guests attended the event held in the Alumni Sports and Recreation Center on Thursday.
In the spring, Dr. Paul Schoch, associate professor in the School of Engineeering, was presented with the idea of using a blimp for LITEC by representatives of BAE Systems who were looking to increase their company’s exposure at RPI. He and his colleagues looked at other ways to improve the course, but Schoch said there was “nothing that captured our imagination the way the blimp did.”
Currently, LITEC is designed around the Motorola HC11 microcontroller on board a smart race car. As a final project, the students make their car autonomously navigate a white strip of tape on a black surface. In the new curriculum, the car may be used to introduce microcontroller concepts, and blimp control will be used as the final project.
The current helium-filled, $4,000 blimp is 11’5” by 6’8” in diameter. A gondola attached to the polyurethane body contains motor drivers and will support an additional two pounds of payload. The department is ordering more blimps at the sub-$2,000 level. A commercial autopilot system is included in both, however Syed Murtuza, instructor of the senior design class tasked with making the blimp functional for LITEC students said, “We came to the conclusion that it was too awkward to work with commercial autopilot…students wouldn’t learn as much.”
Murtuza says there are three mechanical engineering and eight computer and systems engineering students in the class. The mechanical engineers are working on the modeling and design of the gondolas so that there is easy access for circuit boards and other ballasts. Four students from the Microprocessor System Design class are designing hardware and software to integrate the Intel 8051 microprocessor with the smart car. Even though a fancy graphical user interface was not a priority, a few students from Software Engineering have taken up this task as a term project.
Gregory Wallace ’04, team leader of the students working to make the blimp into an autonomous vehicle, says that one of the team’s goals is to get to a point where sophomore LITEC students can handle the complexity. As not every team will receive a blimp, the LITEC focus will be more on programming. “We feel that students need more of a challenge in developing control algorithms,” Wallace said.
Schoch says blimps will not fit in the lab, requiring them to be flown in either the Armory or Houston Field House. Teams will be allotted time to fly the blimp after their subsystems have been built and functionality has been demonstrated to the TA. Around four to eight blimps will be purchased for the course and there will be enough gondolas for about every other group to design different subsystems. Then, each pair of people might build a specific subsystem for the blimp.
The course curriculum for LITEC needs to be developed after the senior engineering students accomplish their goal of making the blimp subsystems usable by LITEC students. Murtuza said, “We are working closely with the TAs…and we meet with them and Professor Schoch on a regular basis to make sure we are meeting their requirements.”
Wallace says the design team has individual systems working such as an altimeter, compass, and RF link. As all the sensors are working, the team needs to get all of them to work together as well as fine tune the system. The blimp is expected to be introduced into LITEC during the summer of 2004 as a pilot run and then tested on a LITEC class in Fall 2004. Schoch says full implementation should take place in Spring 2005.
