The aim was to develop a tool for students potentially interested in working in the lab and familiarize them with the available equipment. This project explores the development of a 3D application in Virtual Reality where a simulation of the In The Know Lab from the ITS building was created with additional virtual educational and creative features. The hope is that such assignments will lead students to both practice their programming skills and to explore socially relevant issues that may not be personally acquainted with but are relevant to today’s world. In this way students are applying the skills learned throughout the course to understand and think about a social issue. For example, I observed a general decrease in funding as the number of minorities in a county decreased when I implemented and tested the assignment.
The assignment specifically guides students to consider issues of race, percentage of local revenue, and how these factors they affect the public-school system. Those skills are applied in the context of understanding data from the US Census Bureau regarding public school finances and the demographics of counties.
DRONE STATION COMPUTER DOWNLOAD
I designed an assignment for an introduction to computer science class which requires students to download data, to parse through the data, and to analyze that data using lists, dictionaries, loops, and other skills learned in class. His project is motivated by the fact that there is an increasing need for students to be knowledgeable about technology as well as how technology can be used to understand and to affect society. Socially Relevant Computer Science Assignments
This future implementation will drastically improve an autonomous drone’s range while also decreasing its dependency on constant wireless connections to the internet or a control unit. This tracking stemmed from the analysis of a video stream from Tello’s camera with the Open Computer Vison Python library.Įven though HelloTello runs on a computer outside of the drone itself, this research paves the way for utilizing lightweight computers such as the Jetson Nano as on-board control computers for larger drones. Eventually, I produced the HelloTello desktop program capable of communicating with a Tello over a wireless connection and either manually controlling the drone with a keyboard or autonomously allowing it to follow 13 unique objects.
Additionally, I aimed to shrink the computing power necessary to execute the program from a power-hungry 65W desktop Intel CPU to a 10W Nvidia Jetson Nano micro-GPU. While working under the HPC branch of Pomona’s ITS department, I set out to develop a Python program that enables a small Tello EDU drone to autonomously follow an object. While these combinations have been successfully harnessed by both researchers and commercial drone producers to a certain extent, the computer vision component remains a technical challenge for one reason: it requires an intense amount of computing power. The autonomous piloting of a drone requires the symphonious combining of GPS, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), and computer vision data. Autonomous Dronesĭavid D’Attile ’22 Advisor: Asya Shklyar Below are recent summer research projects in the Computer Science Department. The Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) enables students to conduct extended, focused research in close cooperation with a Pomona faculty member.