Excellence in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Capstones are projects undertaken by all students in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science in the final year of their undergraduate studies. Capstones are named after the finishing stone that sits atop a built structure. The symbol is a fitting one, since Capstone projects are intended to be the culmination of engineering education — they unify a student’s diverse skills and knowledge.
On Wednesday May 21, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering recognized some of the best Capstones from the past year. To see more photos from the ceremony, visit the flickr page.
To see Capstone projects from other departments in the Faculty, check out the stories about the Ice Runner and Mars Rover, and Faculty Accolades for May, 2014.
Capstone Design Project awards 2013-2014
1st Place Award for Project: Human–Robot Communication Through Voice Command
Yazen Alkouri
Omer Khan
Venkata Lakshmi Mantha
Mital Prajapati
Supervisors: W. P. Zhu, S. Kumar Roy
2nd. Place Award for Project: A Wearable Breathing Detector System
Pierre-Michel Bédard
Marwan Geagea
Dan Qi Liu
Zeeshan Mahmood
Supervisor: R. Raut
3rd. Place Award for Project: 3D Printer for Microwave Antennas
Reza Amiri
Lukasz Bialowas
Dan Cosmin Dobrescu
Thomas Hayes
Supervisor: A. Kishk
The team of four students who worked on the first-place project, "Human–Robot Communication Through Voice Command," nicknamed their creation Gump. His name was inspired of course, by the film Forrest Gump. The team is enormously enthusiastic about their project. Team leader, Venkata Lakshmi Mantha, explains the greater learning objectives behind their creation. “We apply the knowledge from four years here,” she says, “and we have to create a product and be able to sell the idea to the public.”
The thinking behind Gump is that he is the prototype for the personal assistant-type robot of the future: a more sophisticated version of Gump could help with chores like taking out the trash and washing the floors. For now, the eight commands he responds to are simple, but the thinking behind the project is very sophisticated. Speech recognition is no easy task.
Allowing for the sheer diversity of tones and accents, the team behind Gump collected over 5,000 voice samples. Furthermore, they had to study how humans walk, and needed to figure out how a much more limited robot could perform similar motions. Yazen Khoury, the team member in charge of hardware, schematic design, and bipedal leg building, speaks for the whole group when he says, “We are passionate about personal robots—robots that humans can relate to.” [Excerpt from an article to appear in the forthcoming Concordia Engineering News.]
ELEC/COEN 390 Team Design Projects
Fall 2013 Project
1st Place Team: Top Guns
Khaled Abdo
Gordon Bailey
Andrei Jianu
Joanie Robitaille
2nd. Place Team: The Yokozuna
Steven Fagen
Juan Carlos Miranda Bazan
Alexandre Picotte
Eric Potvin
Winter 2014 Project
1st. Place Team: Red Lightning
Alexander Andrea Gambino
Marc-André Lauzier
Babak Salimi
Tena Thambiaiah
2nd. Place Franky Horse
Zhuang Liu
Ramy Yacoub
Thahmid Zuberi
3rd. Place Team : 2Sumorobot
Tarek El-Achkar
Matthew Higgins
Shamita Tabassum Nur
Howard Tzu-Hao Wang