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Final Project Report Autonomous Planetary Rover
Full text linkThe Autonomous Rover Team (ART) was tasked with installing an autonomous navigation system onto an inherited rover frame. The navigation system must be able to plan a course between waypoints in a mapped area while avoiding unmapped obstacles. The final deliverables for this project are a rover with limited movement capabilities that can be autonomously or manually controlled and a simulated rover which has complete movement capabilities. Both rovers should be able to complete a 1600 ft2 course by traveling between three waypoints in a mapped area. The camera systems should detect and avoid all obstacles in its path in real time.
As inherited, the rover frame was unstable and lacked proper control mechanisms. The first goal of the ART was to elevate the rover to an operable condition so that it could withstand the final obstacle course. The rocker-bogie suspension was removed and the legs were attached to the frame, which increased torsional rigidity. Other minor modifications were made to the mechanical and electrical subsystems to increase reliability. To prove the electro-mechanical upgrades increased stability, the ART installed a joystick and created a program for manual operation. The joystick-control test showed that all motors responded correctly to the joystick and that the rover could drive without failure over short distances. After repeated turns, the front and rear legs begin to bow-out from the weight of the frame, forcing the operator to pause the rover and readjust the legs. This problem should be fixed when future teams install a more robust suspension and reinforce the chassis. The ART recommends shrinking the frame and using a more rigid material to construct the arms.
The rover is controlled by a single board computer called the Jetson Nano which uses ROS2 (Robot Operating System) to interface external components with the navigation system. The Jetson runs an older version of ROS2, which is not supported by most libraries. Currently, the team has interfaced the Jetson with the ZED2 camera which detected objects and produced odometry data through a ROS2 node. The ART also interfaced the Jetson to the motors through a ROS node which translates keyboard inputs to motor controls. Although the waypoint follower code is not complete, the NAV2 library contains a script for creating a waypoint follower node. If future teams can interface this node with the camera and motor control nodes, then the autonomous navigation systems will be complete.
The simulated rover is not constrained by the same software limitations as the Jetson, but the available computers in the lab space do not contain proprietary hardware needed to simulate the ZED2 camera. The ART has simulated both simplified and complete models of the rover which lack the camera and added a script to move the simplified rover via the arrow keys. Updated libraries should allow future teams to quickly develop the simulated navigation system after the hardware has been successfully installed and tested. In conclusion, the ART has not completed the autonomous navigation system, but they have created a foundation for future teams to install their software
Students with Vision and Hearing Loss
No full textThis website provides extensive online Resources, Activities, and Research for educators and families providing services to students who are Vision Impaired or Blind, and those who experience Hearing Loss or are Deaf. The site has a long history: As a collaborative project from 2005 - 2024, many experts in Vision and Hearing in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand have continued to contribute and expand their research, teaching, and parenting strategies as a valuable ongoing resource for professional training, educational practice in Special Education, and application for students with disabilities in classrooms and homes. The website is maintained and updated by Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.
Strategies focus on Inclusion of students with vision and hearing losses within general education classrooms, including: best teaching strategies; Assistive Technology to enable students’ full participation; behavior management and social skills programs to develop friendships and enhance self-esteem.
Included Research and Practice involve understanding the process of Vision and Hearing; identifying students with sensory losses; promoting classroom and social learning; available professional, family, and community support.
Emphasis is on working with children and families from varied racial, cultural and economic backgrounds; across diverse geographical regions and continents; methods for teachers to interact well with parents, model and embrace acceptance of diversity in their classrooms. Within each chapter, extensive international Links to Internet Resources are included for additional information. Articles and conference papers by experts also explore philosophical and research-based conclusions from acknowledged leaders in Vision and Hearing.
Manuscript Submissions are accepted from international professionals involved in Non-Profit, validated Research and Practice for students with Vision and Hearing loss, including interventions for those living in lower-economic communities and/or from diverse language, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. (See the “Submission Guidelines” section of this website for Topics, Formats, and Dates.
On Fiction and Being a Good Animal
No full textArgues that literature has a special role to play in developing a wishful, visionary, and utopian sensibility for living in a more-than-human world Suggests ways that fiction can provoke and amaze, inspire and frighten, delight and surprise readers into becoming better animals among nonhuman creatures and within the wider, nonhuman world Forges new connections between critical animal studies, critical social theory, and literary ethics Encourages readers to attend to the eccentricity of fiction by which we may discover the unseen presences of better worlds for human-nonhuman animal relationships
Instead of making readers into better people, what if fiction could help us to become better animals? On Fiction and Being a Good Animal argues that we should abandon the persistent humanist idea that fiction can produce better people. Instead, we should read and value fiction according to its ability to help us to envision being better animals. Inspired by Theodor W. Adorno, David Rando defines a good animal as one who does not live a life of domination. He argues that when readers approach fiction’s wishful images with non-anthropocentric expectations, we are rewarded by anthropocosmic visions of the world - ones in which humans are in and with the world but no longer at the centre of it. In compelling readings of Agustina Bazterrica, T. C. Boyle, Leonora Carrington, Marian Engel, Karen Joy Fowler, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, Clarice Lispector, Kenzaburo Oe, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jesmyn Ward, the book explores wishful images that pertain to the nonhuman and more-than-human worlds. Readers will discover in this fiction wishful images relating to irreconcilable minds and experiences, human-nonhuman family relationships, love and risk across race and species, and shared vulnerability, communion and pleasure.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1197/thumbnail.jp
WIP: “We Just Did That”: Building Engineering Identity and Sense of Belonging Through Team Accomplishment in First-Year Design Projects
Full text linkThis work in progress research paper explores the ways that team-based design-build-compete projects may build engineering identity and a sense of belonging during the first year of an undergraduate engineering program. We analyzed end of semester retrospective interviews of students to identify instances of the quantity and quality of interaction criteria for developing a sense of belonging and the performance and recognition factors for developing engineering identity. Early findings suggest that the design project provides opportunities to develop both identity and sense of belonging. Additionally, a sense of belonging may have helped students to buffer negative performance and recognition to reframe the project as a positive team experience
Plant Worlds
Full text linkPlant communities create and enable most of Earth’s living worlds by shaping ecological water and airflows, producing energy and matter through photosynthesis, and linking into vast, interconnected mycorrhizal fungal networks of communication to form interactive, multispecies, and distributive intelligences. We all live in various plant-formed worlds, an under-acknowledged fact in many extractivist cultures today. This essay briefly compares three works of science fiction featuring alien forest worlds that focus specifically on world-shaping vegetal power in which human or humanoid beings exist: Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1972 The Word for World is Forest, Alan Dean Foster’s 1975 Midworld and Marcus Hammerschitt’s 1998 German novel, Target. These three texts immerse the reader in alien forest worlds dominated by plants that human beings try to exploit with various forms of failure. From these explicit failures in otherworldly realms, we find narrative options for reimagining our relationships and resonances with our own powerful vegetal beings back on Earth
Age And Provenance Relationships Between the Basal Great Valley Group and Its Underlying Basement: Implications for Initiation of the Great Valley Forearc Basin, California, U.S.A.
No full textThe Great Valley forearc (GVf) basin, California, records deposition along the western margin of North America during active oceanic subduction from Jurassic through Paleogene time. Along the western GVf, its underlying basement, the Coast Range Ophiolite (CRO), is exposed as a narrow outcrop belt. CRO segments are overlain by the Great Valley Group (GVG), and locally, an ophiolitic breccia separates the CRO from basal GVG strata. New stratigraphic, petrographic, and geochronologic data (3865 detrital and 68 igneous zircon U-Pb ages) from the upper CRO, ophiolitic breccia, and basal GVG strata clarify temporal relationships among the three units, constrain maximum depositional ages (MDAs), and identify provenance signatures of the ophiolitic breccia and basal GVG strata. Gabbroic rocks from the upper CRO yield zircon U-Pb ages of 168.0 ± 1.3 Ma and 165.1 ± 1.2 Ma. Prominent detrital-zircon age populations of the ophiolitic breccia and GVG strata comprise Jurassic and Jurassic–Early Cretaceous ages, respectively, with pre-Mesozoic ages in both that are consistent with sources of North America affinity. Combined with petrographic modal analyses that show abundant volcanic grains (\u3e 50%), we interpret the breccia to be mainly derived from the underlying CRO, with limited input from the hinterland of North America, and the basal GVG to be derived from Mesozoic igneous and volcanic rocks of the Sierra Nevada–Klamath magmatic arc and hinterland. Analysis of detrital-zircon grains from the lower and upper ophiolitic breccia yields MDAs of ∼ 166 Ma and ∼ 151 Ma, respectively. Along-strike variation in Jurassic and Cretaceous MDAs from basal GVG strata range from ∼ 148 to 141 Ma, which are interpreted to reflect diachronous deposition in segmented depocenters during early development of the forearc. The ophiolitic breccia was deposited in a forearc position proximal to North America \u3c 4 Myr before the onset of GVG deposition. A new tectonic model for early development of the GVf highlights the role of forearc extension coeval with magmatic arc compression during the earliest stages of basin development
Propagating conviviality: Waiwai cultural transformation of moral depravity
Full text linkThis essay considers the problematics of anthropological translations when its responsibility to the codes of its modernist subjectivity persuades us to defer judgment on interpretations made of indigenous semiotics of life. It begins with this full disclosure before attempting to describe, from a translation of a Waiwai myth, how one can produce a guilty reading about their privileging of concern for conviviality. The Waiwai bodily feeling of well-being must be in place before relations of trust can be enacted. Transforming the vial aggressive feelings of strangers becomes a priority for hosting them. Maintaining feelings of conviviality within the community is a daily preoccupation of life. Feeding and eating food together, an ethical precondition for well-being, become how the social life of the cassava plant contributes to virtuous sociality. Thus, the essay intends to present the usefulness of anthropological translations not to offer what is right or wrong, true or false, but rather the affirmation that other ways of being human are available
Kita vai à Kwamalasamutu
No full textNo contexto de uma série de encontros entre pessoas zo\u27é e tiriyó na região da fronteira Brasil-Suriname, o presente artigo aborda a experiência de Kita, jovem zo’é que em 2010 viajou com alguns chefes e pastores tiriyó e permaneceu na aldeia Kwamalasamutu, no sul do Suriname, por alguns meses. A partir de dois relatos de Kita, procuro seguir as múltiplas conexões por ele mobilizadas e articulá-las a problemas relevantes da etnologia das Guianas. Seguindo a proposta metodológica de S. Oakdale (2007) no sentido de ancorar a “economia simbólica da alteridade” em autobiografias ameríndias, o objetivo é imbricar a crônica de acontecimentos recentes e a etnografia de conceitos e relações ameríndias
A música na tradição indígena wai wai
No full textEste trabalho trata da história da música na tradição do povo indígena wai wai, um grupo de língua caribe da região guianense. A pesquisa se passa entre os Wai Wai do rio Mapuera (norte do Pará), tendo como foco os conhecimentos de anciãos e as músicas antigas que eles conhecem. Aqui tratamos da definição do que é música e instrumento musical para os Wai Wai, quem pode e quem não pode tocar e/ou ouvir música. Descrevemos as histórias dos lugares antigos de habitação dos Wai Wai, onde moravam outrora, no rio Baracuxi (Kikwo), os nomes das aldeias e os nomes das principais pessoas que ali viviam, para, em seguida, descrever as festas para celebrar eventos. Nestas festas havia muita música, dança e bebida fermentada, antes da chegada da religião (cristã) com missionários norte-americanos. Por fim, trazemos alguns dados para pensar a musicalidade nas aldeias wai wai de hoje em dia, discutindo sua tradição e modernidade
Emergency Water Station 4.0
Full text linkThe South Texas Human Rights Center (STHRC) has identified a need to implement portable emergency water stations along the Mexico-Texas border in order to provide much-needed water to refugees and migrants who face critical levels of dehydration when crossing the border. These stations must be resistant to harsh weather conditions, capable of sustaining load without structural damage, and able to accurately measure and relay the amount of water remaining back to the STHRC, so refills can be provided as needed.
This year’s project aims to address the problem of station portability through a redesign of the water station. Volunteers who set up the previous version of the Emergency Water Station 3.0 have found the stations to be bulky and difficult to transport. Given this problem, the overall project objective is to make the base modular, easy to transport, and easy to assemble. In addition, the secondary objectives include debugging the electronics subsystem and relocating the LED switch to a more accessible location for the volunteers.
The design constraints identified for this project include the base must hold 18 water jugs, hold and protect all electrical components required for data transmission, withstand the harsh weather conditions of the Mexico-Texas border, and it must be able to be constructed in 30 minutes by 2 trained personnel. We also had a time constraint of 2 semesters and had a budget of $1200.
To accomplish our objectives we have adjusted the previous design to include a slotting mechanism for the interior ramp structure and angle brackets to reinforce the main outer structure. These improvements allow the station to be disassembled into portable sheets and reassembled at new locations. In addition to the structural improvements, we have replaced most of the electronic components, debugged the communications system and added a switch for the LED at the bottom of the flagpole.
The new structure has passed several tests including a static load test, water jug storage test, and assembly test. The results of these tests indicate the water station should withstand all environmental stresses and be fully operational when placed on the Mexico-Texas border. Additionally, we required our electronics system to be IP55 compliant as outlined in IEC Code 60529. After conducting the test outlined in this code, we found our electronics system to be IP55 compliant. We required our new structure to assemblable in 30 mins or less by 2 trained personnel. During our assembly test we found 2 unfamiliar volunteers were able to assemble the structure in 31 minutes. We have since revised our instruction manual and are confident that upon their next attempt, the structure could be assembled in 30 minutes.
Based on our testing, our station meets all physical design constraints and project requirements. However, we have not completed the testing of the electronics system. However, the previous year was able to produce a working communication system, therefore we are confident we can recreate their system and produce the same results as them, which would prove our station is fully functional