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- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Status: Published
The main purpose of this project is to create a method for determining the absolute position of an accelerometer. Acceleration and angular speed were obtained from an accelerometer attached to a vehicle as it moves around. As the vehicle moves to collect information the orientation of the accelerometer changes, so a rotation matrix is applied to the data based on the angular change at each time. The angular change and distance are obtained by using the trapezoidal approximation of the integrals. This method was first validated by using simple sets of "true" data which are explicitly known sets of data to compare the results to. Then, an analysis of how different time steps and levels of noise affect the error of the results was performed to determine the optimal time step of 0.1 sec that was then used for the actual tests. The tests that were performed were: a stationary test for uses of calibration, a straight line test to verify a simple test, and a closed loop test to test the accuracy. The graphs for these tests give no indication of the actual paths, so the final results can only show that the data from the accelerometer is too noisy and inaccurate for this method to be used by this sensor. The future work would be to test different ways to get more accurate data and then use it to verify this methods. These ways could include using more sensors to interpolate the data, reducing noise by using a different sensor, or adding a filter. Then, if this method is considered accurate enough, it could be implemented into control systems.
Because the Ultimate community considers itself to be progressive, despite its largely Caucasian makeup, one topic of exploration was the political landscape of the Ultimate community. A second unique aspect of ultimate is the system for enforcing rules used by the players on the field, known as the spirit of the game. This system replaces referees and creates an ethical dynamic both during play and within the community that is not found in other sports. The last major topic of study here is the self-perception of the players as athletes. Because Ultimate continues to maintain a reputation as an alternative sport, athletes may perceive themselves differently than in more established sports.
When asked if Ultimate players perceived the Ultimate community as accepting of athletes who are people of color (POC) or members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender community (LGBT), the community reported being accepting of all minorities. However, acceptance of POC athletes was rated significantly lower than the acceptance of LGBT athletes. When asked about comradery, the respondents rated comradery higher within the Ultimate community than in other sports. When asked how impartial players were in Ultimate compared to other sports, players with more experience tended to report perceiving themselves as more impartial. All demographics reported being more impartial in Ultimate than in other athletics. When asked about the seriousness of Ultimate, those who had not played another sport considered Ultimate to be more serious than those who had played another sport. In addition, players with more years of Ultimate experience also considered it to be more serious than those with fewer years of experience. Overall, additional studies on Ultimate culture are needed in order to obtain more viewpoints, as there is a lack of research in this field for comparison.