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ECE undergraduate students win TI Analog Design Contest

Recently, a team of ELEN 405 undergraduate students won the Texas Instruments (TI) Analog Design Contest at Texas A&M University.

Team BAAM, which consisted of Brian Thomas, Alan Letz, Andrew Schaper and Morgan May, originally submitted their design as a submission for an internal robotics design competition in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering 405 class, in which student groups had to create an autonomous mobile vehicle that could navigate an obstacle-ridden path to two waypoints marked by audio beacons. It won the both the internal robotics competition and the "Best Senior Design Project," in addition to the $3000 TI prize.

The TI contest is open to design teams having a minimum of three team members. All design entries must be implemented using three different TI analog devices from the following categories: (i) data converters; (ii) amplifiers; (iii) power management devices; (vi) interface devices; (v) MSP430 (MCU+ADC); (iv) switches; (vii) RF devices; (viii) temperature sensors; and (ix) clocks and timers, (x) comparators.

Designs were judged on the following equally weighted criteria: (i) originality of design, (ii) quality of design, (iii) creativity of design, (iv) level of engineering analysis and (v) written description of how each TI analog integrated circuit benefited the overall design.
Team BAAM designed and built an autonomous robot capable of sequentially navigating to multiple pulsating audio beacons at specified frequencies so it could avoid contact with obstacles in its path and navigate around the obstacles to achieve its objective.
According to their summary, Team BAAM designed and built analog audio filtering elements, combined with an analog and digital phase detection apparatus enabling realtime processing of all signals using an inexpensive PIC microcontroller so it could use a timing-based approach, rather than an amplitude based approach, to track each beacon.
In order to detect obstacles in the robot’s path, an array of three ultrasonic distance sensing devices has been implemented. This array is utilized to support efficient turning and avoidance algorithms as the robot navigates through its environment.

The majority of the computation takes place within the PIC, which has been programmed using PICBASIC PRO. The code is designed to be modular, with specialized subroutines that implement data acquisition, data processing, or actuation of the motors.

To of view a summary of the project report click here.