Project Progression

Week 1
The Start to my summer

Nao Robot

On May 15 I began my DREU program. I met with Dr. Gilbert, we spoke about how my project may be changing and he told me to talk to one of his PhD students and a project I might be interested in. I spoke to Jessica (his PhD student), and she brought up an interesting research project about the Nao robot.


After our talk I looked up the Nao robot and looked at various ways I could program it. I spent the rest of my first week doing literature review on the Nao robot and I find it pretty interesting. I’m feeling excited to see how this summer unfolds!


Project Progression

Week 2
Moving forward

My Lab

I found out that Dr. Gilbert has decided to bring back my old project the Brain Drone race project. I am really looking forward to this because I feel that there are so much more opportunities to do break through research with this project.


I have used this week to look into ways of solving the problem that Dr. G has given me which is, to be able to decipher between different brain signals and map these signals to different drone commands which in Dr. G's opinion is the key to having full control of the drone.


Project Progression

Week 3
Breaking the Ceiling

Paint App

This week the DREU students were tasked with creating our very own paint app similar to the Microsoft version, using a programming language of our choice I chose python. Photo above is my finished application


This project was not as difficult as I had previously expected. I choose to use python since I was not as familiar with it and wanted a better understanding of the programming language. I did a quick Google search on how to create programs in python and came across youtube videos that showed how to do so using pygame and Tkinter. After watch a few videos I felt that Tkinter was a better choice to go with. I came across problems when attempting to add colors and switch between drawing methods. I resolved this by learning how to create toolbar menus and adding the options there.


Project Progression

Week 4
Making Progress

This week was spent mostly reviewing journal articles on BCI devices and drones. Spent most my time trying to find articles that were relevant to controlling drones with your brain but after a few days I realized that not many people are published in this area.


After looking over many different articles and changing the keywords and search criteria that I was using I was able to create a pretty useful Annotated Bibliography to use as a reference in solving this multi-brain signal problem.


Annotated Bibliography

Project Progression

Week 5
The Midpoint

Bowling

This Week was pretty eventful. Our lab decided that we should all take a break from work and have some fun so we all took a lab trip to the bowling alley and it gave me some time to relax and clear my mind so that I could figure out how to solve this problem


As far as my research goes I am still struggling to move forward because I feel that my problem is more on the end of signal processing. I think I have to shift my focus and find alternative methods of processing the EEG signals that the BCI devices are receiving.


Project Progression

Week 6
Making Changes

This week Dr.Gilbert decided to give me an alternate project that is extremely important to him at the moment. The project is based off his Prime3 voting project that many states are looking at using. I was tasked with combining the Prime3 code with a windows tablet application that makes the Prime3 code which runs in chrome the main application on the tablet.


I feel that Dr. Gilbert must really trust my work ethic to give me such a pivotal project to be working on excited to see how this goes.


Project Progression

Week 7
Understanding the Process

The Prime3 project has taken up alot of my time this week. It is not as easy as I had previously thought. The code for Prime3 is a maze in itself since it is all coded in html. I am struggling to figure out how exactly to connect a web based program to a local hard drive based application. I will continue to get more familiar with the code and solve this problem.


Project Progression

Week 8
Bringing Things Together

This week I was finally able to combine the two Prime3 programs, the chrome based Prime3 project and the Windows application. Unfortunately it is not working the way it is supposed to. When looking over the Windows applications documentation, I saw that the program is supposed to allow the Prime3 to be run in Kiosk mode as the only application as well as giving Prime3 the power to disable the windows key and restart the computer. These functions do not work from Prime3 but I am able to open the Windows application from Prime3.


I still am unsure as to why this is and I am seeking guidance from my lab and Dr. Gilbert to fix this problem.


Project Progression

Week 9
Closing in

This week was a pretty eventful one I made two different presentations for our DREU research symposium. I was tasked with creating a five minute oral presentation as well as a poster since I felt that I had made more progress on the Brain Drone project I decided to make both the poster and oral on that.


I have included both here.


Oral Presentation Poster


Project Progression

Week 10
Finial Stretch

This week I presented at our DREU research symposium. It was a great experience and I received a lot of great feed back. This is unfortunately my last week as a DREU intern. But there is some good news, I have finally made a breakthrough in the Prime3 project I realized that I was looking at it all wrong. I was only attempting to combine the two programs without looking at how they work on their own.


When I was trying to get the windows application to work I realized that a few of the necessary files needed to make it work were coded wrong after fixing those I saw that in the documentation the way that the necessary registry files were supposed to be installed was also wrong and that was the way I had initially done it. After fixing those problems the it was finally working with one flaw. In order to open Prime3 your have to run a chrome based sever but to open Prime3 in kiosk mode, chrome has to be killed which also kills the server.


I was able to work around it by editing the batch file to open the server after opening Prime3 in Kiosk mode. It does make it so the user is able to switch between kiosk mode and the sever but I have been unable to think of another work around since chrome has to be killed for kiosk mode to work otherwise Prime3 will open in a new tab.

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