Our research project was to design, construct, and launch a high powered rocket with the intention of pushing its velocity significantly past the speed of sound while simultaneously collecting data from which to interpret the max achieved acceleration, velocity, and altitude. The rocket's body has a three inch inner diameter made to fit the 3-inch motor casing without any extra room. This minimum diameter design reduced its weight so that less force was required to achieve higher acceleration, and it provided a smaller cross sectional area than a traditional rocket, thereby reducing the amount of drag force impeding its acceleration. Atypical of most high powered rocket designs, our rocket features a metal tipped nose cone to provide resistance to the heat caused by friction when breaking the sound barrier. At the speeds achieved, unmodified rocket fins will vibrate at extreme rates due to turbulent flow. In order to combat this destructive effect the fins were reinforced with carbon fiber to significantly stiffen them and reduce any resonant effects during flight. The payload consists of a StratoLogger SL100 Altimeter to keep track of the maximum altitude and velocities of our flights as well triggering two separate parachute deployments, achieving a safe landing while also minimizing drift time due to winds at altitude. It is our hope that our research rocket will push the boundaries of velocity and altitude achieved by a junior college rocket team as well as provide insight into ways to optimize our rocket designs to maximize future results.

Real-time quantification of chemical compounds in urban and non-urban environments has far-reaching prospective benefits for our society. Such a possibility could provide instantaneous detection of dangerous chemicals, identification of areas that require air quality restoration, estimation of agricultural effectivity, etc. However, currently, dynamic and efficient platforms to perform quantification do not exist and only a few static sensors are deployed in sparse locations, e.g., a typical city has only a handful of such sensors. While several mobile devices have been constructed, they are typically large, expensive and imprecise. These factors make them practically unrealizable for gathering environmental data in real-time from a wide variety of locations. In our project, we address this fascinating and challenging problem by building an inexpensive, mobile multi-sensor device, that communicates with a mobile phone. We designed the device to incorporate an array of inexpensive sensors, many of which have cross sensitivities to particles measured by other sensors. We had performed testing on a variety of sensors to identify most efficient and precise sensors. To improve performance of the device and obtain readings, we have implemented a neural network, based on olfactory system in moths. We have assembled a prototype of a multi-sensor device according to our design. Our preliminary results show that the network was capable of discriminating and tracking more precise values of contaminants, that could even include mixtures of compounds. We are currently working on implementing a server-side application that will integrate information from multiple devices and will produce a real-time “heat-map” of contaminants and pollution levels across a geographic area.

Blind programmers bring a unique perspective to the computer developer workplace, and make important contributions to the computer science field. However, blind programmers often cannot use computer development environments because they are inaccessible, and usage can be slow and tedious for blind developers who use screen readers. The goal of our research is to design and build plug-ins for various coding environments to make it easier for blind developers to code. In prior work, Ms. Baker made a plug-in called StructJumper for Eclipse, a Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The plug-in creates a navigable hieratical tree based on the nesting structure of a Java class, essentially creating an outline of key points (such as method headings and control flow statements) in the code structure. Blind programmers can switch between StructJumper’s TreeView and default Text Editor to navigate code with greater ease. The usability of StructJumper was tested by seven blind programmers, whose results showed a trend of completing tasks faster with the plug-in then without. This suggests that StructJumper is a viable plug-in to improve accessibility to blind developers. However Java is not the only major programming language developers’ use on a daily basis. Thus we are pursuing further research to extend StructJumper beyond Java and implement plug-ins/add-ons for other commonly used programming languages and development environments, such as for the programming language Python. My work is the start of coding StructJumper as a plug-in for Visual Studio (practically the only screen reader compatible Python IDE). This plug-in is written in Visual Studio using C#, .NET framework, and IronPython to parse Python files open in the IDE.

Global Positioning System (GPS) technology has revolutionized the way we navigate our world, yet there remain many practical geolocalization problems for which the technology is not directly useful, such as in urban environments and scientific field work where GPS satellite L.O.S. (line-of-sight) obstructions are ubiquitous. Motivated by our collaborations with the LEAF School of Anthropology, our work is focused on providing technological solutions for cm-scale GPS-like geolocalization; particularly for researchers doing field work in prohibitive and complicated field topologies through the use of field-configurable ad-hoc geolocalization subnetworks. We present our work on and our methods to utilize time-of-flight measurements from GPS-enabled acoustic and radio frequency sources placed at the boundaries of the field of interest to determine the geographical coordinates of any number of locations within that field.