Project Summary: This project is under the supervision of Dr. Turaj Ashuri of the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at Arkansas Tech University and funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH). The goal of the project is to use elastomer type polymer and create a prosthetic hand as a functional soft-robotic hand.

The first two iterations of the project were fabricated by a group of senior engineering students at Arkansas Tech University. The soft-robotic hand was programmed with the Arduino Uno board with the functionality of imitating the grabbing motion of a human hand.

At this level, the project was handed as the Graduate Research Assistant project to upgrade the functionality and create documentation of the project as the undergraduate team lacked proper documentation of the research.

Contribution to the project:

• Created proper documentation of the project with Powerpoint documentation with video demonstration

• Studied old code and switched to Arduino Mega 2560 board with new code to update functionality of the soft robotic hand, enabling it to mimic hand signs

• Supervised:

  • An electrical undergrad student to design a printed circuit board (PCB) to downsize the controller box for the project

  • A mechanical undergrad student model the soft robotic hand and run numerical finite element analysis (FEA) on the model

Pending update

Developing new print module from design, fabrication, to control using custom circuitry and code that works with collaborative 6 axis robot system. This projects combined knowledge of additive manufacturing process such as FDM , LOM, along with robotic manipulation. 

Additional details will be updated upon publication of the research work

Pending update

Demonstration of manufacturability of a miniature robotic vehicle using a swarm of robotics with manufacturing skills such as 3D printing, laser processing, and manipulation.

Additional details will be updated upon publication of the research work

Project Summary: The objectives of this project were to collect readily available image data set and use deep neural network to train and test a binary image classifier with the data set. Experimenting with hyper-parameters to see the differences in test and train results from the classifier. In this project, image data set was collected from one of the sources where image datasets are readily available for research purposes. The next step was to analyze the data and process it for further use. A deep neural network was used as the binary classifier with different configurations of hyper-parameters to test and train with the dataset. The programming language was python for this project.

Dataset: The dataset contained the images of portraits of people wearing masks. There are two classes of images in this dataset. Class one was portraits of people wearing face masks properly covering their nose and mouth. The second class was images of people incorrectly worn face masks such as not covering the nose, not covering the mouth, leaving at the chin, etc. The entire original dataset source contained more than 134,093 images where 67,193 images with correctly masked face images and 66,900 images with incorrectly masked face datasets. Conveniently all the images were in the same resolution of 1024 x 1024. For simplicity of the project, datasets of 1911 training and 200 test images were used for the entire approach.

As images are three by three matrix each one representing red, blue, and green color to represent an image. With the dataset image resolution, 1024 x 1024 would provide three matrices of the size of the resolution. Thus, each image will have a size of 1024 x 1024 x 3. Each image matrix data need to be stored in a 3-dimensional array and later the training set array will consist of a 4-dimensional array with a size of 1911 x 1024 x 1024 x 3, for the test set the array size will be 200 x 1024 x 1024 x 3.

To reduce the computational cost, the images were reduced to 128 x 128 resolution. Which left the project with a training array with the size 1911 x 128 x 128 x 3 and a testing array of size 200 x 128 x 128 x 3.

Project Summary:  The kinetic energy of a moving bike goes to waste as frictional heat when the braking system takes into effect. This project was focused to harvest the kinetic energy to storage and use that to power a motor for the bike. 

• Literature research for available electric bike's mechanism and technology

• Literature research on the regenerative braking system and drafted conceptual design applicable to this project

• Research on product requirements and legal restrictions focused on product design model for the United States market

• Determine:

  • • • Power requirements by analyzing air drag resistance, rolling resistance, road grading effects, etc.

      • Power supply and storage requirements

      • Motor requirements

• Research on the regenerative braking system and apply the technology to the conceptual design 

• Finalize conceptual design and present to faculty with product design review (PDR)

• Fabricated and mounted the prototype of "The Gen-X-Bike" for product testing

Simulation Program

• Cycle simulation program: After-burning Turbojet engine’s cycle simulation and performance parameters analysis on a variety of input parameters program, written in Python 3.6

Finite Element Analysis

Truss Project: Design and analyze a truss structure to satisfy specific constraints and loading achieving minimal mass, while minimal deflection was a secondary objective

• Analyzed various truss structures to choose an optimal structure to meet design objectives 

• Variations of truss angle were analyzed to meet design goals

• Finite Element Method was used to calculate deflections on the structures  

• Finite Element Analysis software Abaqus CAE and Ansys Workbench were used to run stress analysis

Heat Transfer

• Analyzed theoretical heat transfer effects (conduction, convection, and radiation) to determine the requirements for satisfying project requirements of no more than 4-degree Fahrenheit over 2 hours for a 1-liter coffee beverage

• Ran literature review to determine ideal insulation material that satisfies the project

• 3-D printed coffee container shells to accommodate 1-liter liquid and house the insulation material between the shells (time constraints and availability of 3-D printer led this project to go with available consumer coffee container)

Keyword:

Background: SAP S/4HANA was introduced during the internship opportunity at DBG Arkansas LLC, in Conway, Arkansas. The plant was going through system integration to SAP's cloud server from old digital and print files. Creating/Updating Routing and Work Stations, retrieving Bill of Material (BOM) data, or updating excel spreadsheets with detailed routing information of around 5000 parts were the typical daily job assigned to the interns. Value stream mapping and observation were assigned occasionally.

Maintaining an excel master file with over 20000 rows with more than 10 columns was challenging. Occasionally there were moments when a piece of very specific information about a specific part from SAP needed to be added to the master file. 

Updating the whole file on average took 1.5 weeks for 3 interns working on it. The process was more or less to log in to the SAP server, appropriate application (such as display routing, BOM or etc.) and input specific part numbers and wait for the server to retrieve the data table and find info in needed and update that in the corresponding excel file. Being assigned to this task was a great opportunity to get familiar with SAP S/4HANA cloud ERP.

Methodology/Approach: Occasional discussions between interns brought up the idea that if there was a program to get the information that would both save time and accuracy. While consulting with the manufacturing engineer, it was found that there is no API plug-in currently for the SAP S/4HANA cloud server that would help retract the data from the server. If it was an on-premises server, getting data with an already available API would have been inexpensive in terms of money and time.

Learning Python for scientific calculations and programming is another constant process since my Senior year of college. Basic computation, web scraping, and working with excel files, data frames, etc. were a good foundation for this project.

This brought an opportunity to try and work to automate the data-retrieving procedure. 

The first goal was to enable the code to open an internet browser and go to the cloud server and log in with the provided credentials. The next challenge was to navigate through the homepage and different applications. This is where more exposure to HTML coding was experienced.

Development: Upon developing an algorithm and decision tree/block diagram for the code and consulting with other interns and immediate supervisor for all possible outcomes in case of error like internet issue, server issue, SAP back end error issue, wrong material/part number issue, computer power issue, etc. All possible scenario was taken into consideration making the final algorithm and decision tree which perfected the block diagram. Then the first program was completed to handle "Display Routing" app in SAP and was demonstrated to the immediate supervisor. The supervisor set a time for the demonstration before the I.T. specialist and the Engineering Manager of the plant.

Upon demonstration, new tasks were assigned to create two more additional program that is used commonly in the day-to-day tasks in the plant. A specific workstation was requested by the immediate supervisor to run this program.

Following the same development footstep rest of the programs were completed and demonstrated to the immediate supervisor to test out the programs for code validation. Upon code validation, according to the request, one of the manufacturing engineer's workstations was set up with a related programming language to be able to run the scripts.

To avoid the complication of having programming language, IDE, etc installed to run the program:

The next step was making three programs into one GUI-based script. Upon the completion of the GUI-based code, the whole program was made into an executable to be able to run on all the computers with the Windows operating system. Later, for ease of distribution, a final development was to make the program an executable installation file.

End Results:

Having an updated master file with all routing data for group counter 1, routing data for the latest group counter, and BOM data for over 5000 parts is a time-consuming task if done manually as no API was developed at that time for SAP S/4Hana Cloud Servers. 

• Updating the whole file for 5000 parts for routing data took 1.5 weeks for 3 interns working on it. Which is 1.5 times 5 working days times 8 working hours = 180 hours. The program cuts down the total required time to around 7.5 hours. So time cost was reduced from 180 human hours to 7.5 machine hours

• The human error factor was completely eradicated accuracy-wise, as the program is taking exact data from the servers

• The saved time, money, and personnel could be re-assigned to other tasks resulting in better utilization of resources

For the confidentiality and sensitivity of the SAP S/4HANA coding strategy and DBG Arkansas LLC's data, the detailed development process has been omitted from this page

Pending update date: 02/28/2023