Autonomous Drone for Powerline Inspections

With our autonomous drone design, power companies will save money and time by simply deploying an autonomous drone and inputting the area that needs inspection

Robot Arm

The purpose of this project is to redesign and improve the current robotic arm within the EE Department Lab. This new robotic arm will contain six DOF with clean, organized wiring that can integrate seamlessly with a PLC system for the user to control. The goal is to facilitate the learning process within the lab and cause fewer misoperations that disrupt the student’s ability to learn.

Autonomous Trolley

This project introduces a device that would reduce the physical stress on people that need to carry items to and from locations repeatedly. This would potentially reduce the amount of physical ailments the user has in the future

Smart Meds

This project aims to design a medical management system for multiple medications that will manage a user's pill-based medicine. It will notify the user when it is time to take their prescribed dosage and monitor the actual consumption of the prescribed medicine. As well, it will limit access to medicines from unauthorized users by incorporating biometric security.

Electricity on a Chemical Level – The Potentiostat

The potentiostat allows the user to run electroanalytical experiments on a chemical solution. Through its use, the potentiostat can uncover various parameters of the solution such as its chemical reaction mechanisms and other chemical parameters. The potentiostat is a critical piece of test equipment for research groups who are working with battery cells, photo-voltaic cells, or other unknown chemical solutions. The potentiostat will characterize how the solution will react to an electrical stimulus.

Material Handler Robot

Florida Power and Light (FPL) is the largest energy company in the United States, serving more than 5.1 million customer accounts or more than 10 million people across the state of Florida. There are different types of tools located in hundreds of bins in FPL warehouses. These bins need to be picked up from the shelves and taken into a designated area upon request. This process may take a lot of time and effort if done by a human. In order to speed up this process and avoid using humans to move the bins, there needs to be an autonomous system which will take over these tasks. The system is a material handler robot (MHR) which can autonomously find, retrieve, and return material bins within a warehouse for specific projects while providing seamless supervisory control via an app on a smart device. This includes the capability to avoid obstacles during traversal. It will also include a joystick for manually controlling MHR through the supervisory application.

Virtual Reality Training for AFS

The geography of Florida makes it significantly susceptible to power outages. This led FPL to develop highly efficient smart grids with automation technologies to isolate and restore power. Current practices involve manually operating the Automated Feeder Switch (AFS) installed on power lines that are mounted 40 feet above ground? and linemen need special training to be able to operate them. Development of an interactive 3D virtual Teaching/Learning environment to train on how to operate IntelliRupter for switching purposes. Learning modules associated with safety, part functions, switching sequence, and practice scenarios to effectively retain operational procedures.

Robotic Solar Farm Grass Cutting System Design Challenge

Solar farms utilize photovoltaic (PV) panels to convert sunlight into electrical energy. Ground-mounted solar arrays require maintaining the grass that grows around the base of the arrays, and these grasses tend to be thick, dense and difficult to reach via conventional mowing techniques. The purpose of this project is to minimize the monthly expense of cutting the grass by using AI-assisted, autonomous solar powered rover-based robots to articulate and guide electric weed whackers.