Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3
Description
Complex human controls is a topic of much interest in the fields of robotics, manufacturing, space exploration and many others. Even simple tasks that humans perform with ease can be extremely complicated when observed from a controls and complex systems perspective. One such simple task is that of a human carrying and moving a coffee cup. Though this may be a mundane task for humans, when this task is modelled and analyzed, the system may be quite chaotic in nature. Understanding such systems is key to the development robots and autonomous systems that can perform these tasks themselves.
The coffee cup system can be simplified and modeled by a cart-and-pendulum system. Bazzi et al. and Maurice et al. present two different cart-and-pendulum systems to represent the coffee cup system [1],[2]. The purpose of this project was to build upon these systems and to gain a better understanding of the coffee cup system and to determine where chaos existed within the system. The honors thesis team first worked with their senior design group to develop a mathematical model for the cart-and-pendulum system based on the Bazzi and Maurice papers [1],[2]. This system was analyzed and then built upon by the honors thesis team to build a cart-and-two-pendulum model to represent the coffee cup system more accurately.
Analysis of the single pendulum model showed that there exists a low frequency region where the pendulum and the cart remain in phase with each other and a high frequency region where the cart and pendulum have a π phase difference between them. The transition point of the low and high frequency region is determined by the resonant frequency of the pendulum. The analysis of the two-pendulum system also confirmed this result and revealed that differences in length between the pendulum cause the pendulums to transition to the high frequency regions at separate frequency. The pendulums have different resonance frequencies and transition into the high frequency region based on their own resonant frequency. This causes a range of frequencies where the pendulums are out of phase from each other. After both pendulums have transitioned, they remain in phase with each other and out of phase from the cart.
However, if the length of the pendulum is decreased too much, the system starts to exhibit chaotic behavior. The short pendulum starts to act in a chaotic manner and the phase relationship between the pendulums and the carts is no longer maintained. Since the pendulum length represents the distance between the particle of coffee and the top of the cup, this implies that coffee near the top of the cup would cause the system to act chaotically. Further analysis would be needed to determine the reason why the length affects the system in this way.
The coffee cup system can be simplified and modeled by a cart-and-pendulum system. Bazzi et al. and Maurice et al. present two different cart-and-pendulum systems to represent the coffee cup system [1],[2]. The purpose of this project was to build upon these systems and to gain a better understanding of the coffee cup system and to determine where chaos existed within the system. The honors thesis team first worked with their senior design group to develop a mathematical model for the cart-and-pendulum system based on the Bazzi and Maurice papers [1],[2]. This system was analyzed and then built upon by the honors thesis team to build a cart-and-two-pendulum model to represent the coffee cup system more accurately.
Analysis of the single pendulum model showed that there exists a low frequency region where the pendulum and the cart remain in phase with each other and a high frequency region where the cart and pendulum have a π phase difference between them. The transition point of the low and high frequency region is determined by the resonant frequency of the pendulum. The analysis of the two-pendulum system also confirmed this result and revealed that differences in length between the pendulum cause the pendulums to transition to the high frequency regions at separate frequency. The pendulums have different resonance frequencies and transition into the high frequency region based on their own resonant frequency. This causes a range of frequencies where the pendulums are out of phase from each other. After both pendulums have transitioned, they remain in phase with each other and out of phase from the cart.
However, if the length of the pendulum is decreased too much, the system starts to exhibit chaotic behavior. The short pendulum starts to act in a chaotic manner and the phase relationship between the pendulums and the carts is no longer maintained. Since the pendulum length represents the distance between the particle of coffee and the top of the cup, this implies that coffee near the top of the cup would cause the system to act chaotically. Further analysis would be needed to determine the reason why the length affects the system in this way.
ContributorsZindani, Abdul Rahman (Co-author) / Crane, Kari (Co-author) / Lai, Ying-Cheng (Thesis director) / Jiang, Junjie (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12
Description
The diagnosis for an attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children is heavily based on teacher or parent opinion, and not on scientific evidence. This causes children to be wrongly diagnosed with a disorder and be prescribed medicine that they do not need to be taking. This paper discusses a project that was completed for the Child Study Lab (CSL) preschool at Arizona State University (ASU), in which children’s activity within a classroom was automatically recorded using ultra-wideband technology. This project’s goal was to gather location data on the children in the CSL and analyze and assess the collected data for any patterns of behavior. The hope was that if a child’s data displayed a pattern that strayed from the norm, that this analysis could pose as a more objective way to indicate that a child may have an attention deficit problem. Fractal Dimensions and Levy Flights were researched and applied to the data analysis portion of this project.
ContributorsKjerstad, Kamryn R (Author) / Kozicki, Michael (Thesis director) / Kupfer, Anne (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
There is a demonstrable issue in how new medical technologies are developed. The consumer market is always overflowing with the newest possible technologies; however, this is often not the case in the medical field. The consumer market refers to a product that any individual can buy in a retail store, whereas a product for the medical field is prescribed by a clinician for use by a patient. The development of devices usually targets the consumer market rather than the medical field. This trend leads to the development of devices that may have consumer and clinical benefits not receiving consideration in the clinical market because they are not designed with a strictly medical purpose in mind. This is an issue that needs rectification, as injured patients deserve the best possible care with the best technologies available. The development of these technologies should not be limited by a lack of communication between clinicians and engineers. This thesis will explore why product development in the medical field lags behind that of the consumer market. It will also offer practical solutions, as well as having an engineering team develop a device specifically for use in the medical field. The development of this product will show that the lack of communication between clinicians and engineers is possible to overcome. From this development process, recommendations will be made to offer specific solutions to overcome the communication barrier and aid future product development.
ContributorsMagnotto, Samuel Andrew (Author) / Kozicki, Michael (Thesis director) / Goryll, Michael (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05