TerraSwarm Students at UTD Win Second Place in 2015 TI Innovation Challenge

TerraSwarm UTD students, Jian Wu, Zhongiun Tian and Lu Sun, won second place in the highly competitive 2015 Texas Instruments Innovation Challenge for their project entitled “Real-time American Sign Language Recognition Using Wrist-worn Inertial and Surface EMG Sensors”.  Their second place finish, out of a field of 276 competitors, will earn a $7500 cash award. 

Their submission for the contest, a real-time American Sign Language recognition system, combines surface electromyography (sEMG) with a wrist-worn inertial sensor at the feature level. The inertial sensor-based system is capable of capturing hand orientations and hand and arm movements during a gesture while the sEMG measures finger movements and the muscle activity patterns for the hand and arm. Coupling these two systems increases accuracy, thus enabling recognition of a larger vocabulary of signs.

The Texas Instruments Innovation Challenge is an annual contest designed to encourage engineering students to design projects that utilize TI technology.  All designs must incorporate the use of three different TI devises, as well as TI integrated circuits (ICs) and a TI processor.  A panel of judges selects the winners based on originality, creativity, real world application, level of engineering analysis, usage of TI ICs and processors, and a working demonstration video of the design.

See the UTD team’s video submission and read more about the technology they have developed at: 
https://e2e.ti.com/group/universityprogram/students/m/students_repository/665999 .

Advancing the State-of-the-Art in Medical and Cyber-Physical Systems

TerraSwarm PIs Vijay Kumar and Rahul Mangharam will be participating in two NSF projects being awarded $8.75 million over five years to advance the state-of-the-art in medical applications and cyber-physical systems (CPS).  

UPenn professor Vijay Kumar will lead the bioCPS Project which aims to combine microrobots with synthetic cells to perform functions that may one day lead to tissue and organ regeneration. He will join computer scientists, roboticists and biologists from Boston University and the MIT to develop a system that combines the capabilities of nano­scale robots with specially designed synthetic organisms. Together, they believe this hybrid "bio­CPS" will be capable of performing previously impossible functions, from microscopic assembly to cell sensing within the body. Researchers so far have not been able to control and coordinate the behavior of synthetic cells in isolation, but the introduction of microrobots that can be externally controlled may change that.

The Cyberheart Project is a a virtual, patient-­specific human heart model that can be used to improve and accelerate medical-device testing.  This effort is being led by UPenn associate professor Rahul Mangharam.  He will join researchers from six universities and centers to develop far more realistic cardiac models than currently exist. Such models are essential to improving the software that governs implantable devices, such as pacemakers, defibrillators and cardiac rhythm therapy devices. The team’s "Cyberheart" can be used to test and validate medical devices faster and at a far lower cost than existing methods. The models also can be used to design optimal procedures on a patient­specific heart with fewer risks to the patient.

To read more about these projects, go to the NSF Press Release "Exploring a new frontier of cyber-physical systems: The human body" or the University Pennsylvania news release "Penn Researchers Join Two NSF Projects on Medical Cyber-Physical Systems".

UTD announces official opening of their TI Innovation Lab

The University of Texas, Dallas (UTD) announced the official opening of their new Texas Instruments Innovation Lab (Texas Instruments Supports Innovative Research with New Lab).  The 1100-square-foot facility will be a place for students and faculty in engineering and computer science to develop electronic and electromagnetic solutions for a variety of engineering problems. The TI lab is located within the UTDesign Studio. It will be used for academic classes, independent and collaborative student projects and workshops taught by TI staff. The TI workshops will focus on how to design well-rounded products that account for reliability, cost savings, product size and harsh environments. 

The official opening included a demonstration of new technology developed by TerraSwarm PI and UTD associate professor Roozbeh Jafari and his students whereby an electrode-studded glove worn by a student communicating with sign language was translated onto a computer screen.  It’s a promising new technology that may one day help the hearing impaired communicate more easily.

To read the announcement in full, go to: Texas Instruments Supports Innovative Research with New Lab.

TerraSwarm Teams are Top Performers at Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition

Microsoft held an Indoor Localization Competition at IPSN 2015 / CPS week in Seattle.  The goal of the competition was to bring together real-time or near real-time indoor location technologies and compare performance.  Submissions were divided into two categories: infrastructure-based, ie. systems that need to deploy custom hardware (30 submissions) and infrastructure-free (17 submissions). Two of the top four teams that competed were TerraSwarm performers (CMU and UMich). 

In the Infrastructure-based category, CMU fielded the top team (“ALPS: AN Ultrasonic Localization Systems”, Lazik et al.), beating out 29 other competitors. The University of Michigan placed third (“Exploring State of the Art Commercial Localization”, Campbell et. al.).

For more information about the competition, including a slide deck of final results and the full evaluation data, go to:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/indoorloccompetition2015/.