Electrical and Computer Engineering Students Present Theses

In March, the selection of quarterly AFCEA Wozencraft electrical and computer engineering academic honor awardees was performed by the department chairman and faculty committee, and included thesis presentations. Prior to thesis presentations, Department Chair Dr. Clark Robertson showed the chapter his Hamming Teaching Award from Hedy Lamarr, well known for her movies and invention of spread spectrum technology.

Chapter member Honorable Dennis Donohue, former Salinas mayor and Salinas Valley high tech STEM leader, presented the 130th Wozencraft award to Lt. Andrew Jackson, USN.

Jackson's thesis project addressed space environment radiation impact on computer processing and memory hardware, e.g. single event upsets and functional interrupts causing logical values in memory elements to change, detectable and correctable with various error mitigation techniques. His thesis "proof" will be tested with NPS Satellite 1 and his computer hardware XILINX Kintex-7FPGAs will be launched into orbit on Space X Falcon 9 in late 2016.

Cole Johnson, Edwards Air Force Base civilian engineer, presented GPS-accuracy method providing position data for riflemen in closed areas. His thesis based on gait-phase detection algorithm and quaternion-based complementary filter to track position by distributing multiple Inertial Measurement Units on person's body, accomplished by characterizing 9 degree-of-freedom IMU, placement examined to determine sensor location effects on accuracy and position solution for a weapons network.

Lt. Cmdr. Jose Gloria, Mexican Navy, discussed how to achieve correspondence between runways on map and individual video frames. Algorithms developed and simulation reconstructed 3D views from aircraft camera, maps and navigational data. Algorithm developed using drone video - sensor noise mismatches corrected with Hough Transform.

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