Turab Raza, Electrical Engineering, Class of 2014

Conventional Solar Technology utilizes semiconductors (especially silicon) to capture (light) photons’ energy which then charges the battery. But Silicon can only capture a certain spectrum of electromagnetic waves (remember, visible light is just a small fraction of the whole spectrum).

Scientists are developing alternative technologies and utilizing alternate materials like plastics to increase the efficiency of the solar cell.

The Future: HKU’s Story

Our team discussed upcoming Solar Technology innovations with Turab Raza, a final year Electrical Engineering student. In the Engineering faculty all students work on a final year project (FYP), which runs through the whole year. Turab is doing an FYP on Organic Solar Cells under the guidance of Dr. Wallace Choy, associate Professor in the EEE department.

Final year projects are a popular feature of the curriculum throughout the world. Technology and Research companies throughout the world are interested in FYPs and are even ready to purchase them from the team while offering jobs to the candidates.

Using a success story from Hong Kong, former City University student Mr. Francis Kwong decided to work on ‘Semantic Web’ – a relatively new concept in 2002. He entered his research to the IEEHK YMS competition and won 2 scholarships totally worth HK$250,000 per year, renewable till he finishes his PhD.

How to create the Magic?

Turab’s work involves testing different materials as substitute for silicon in a solar cell. While the work may seem straightforward it is similar to Edison’s quest to find the optimum material for a light bulb. In a description of his regular duty, he performs one simple process once or twice every week. This process takes a whopping 12 hours each time!

1. Clean the substrate (special glass piece) using acetone and ethanol until it is squeaky clean
    (which can take up to an hour!)
2. Evaporate the organic material onto the substrate and place it in a vacuum
    (Gradually a cell with positive and negative poles will form)
3. Measure the power across this cell
4. Place the cell under a Sun Simulator and measure the efficiency

Advisor – Your new Best Friend!

Turab has been working under his advisor, Dr. Choy since his second year as a Research Assistant (RA).
“The role of an Advisor is crucial to your FYP as they determine your pace of work while offering guidance and support.” Said Turab, “I meet my advisor 2 to 3 times a week.”

Advice to Juniors

For juniors, he advises them to select a FYP topic by the end of the penultimate year. To do this, the students should talk to various professors about their work and decide on what they want to do in the year ahead.

The work on organic solar cells still continues; Turab could not certainly say if his project would see the light of the day or fade into oblivion – such is the unpredictability of research. It is the exhaustive scenario in parallel with what Edison said on his invention, “I now know 999 ways a light bulb wouldn’t light up”.

Your Chance to Gape!

HKU’s Final Year Projects will be on public display in the beginning of May – a great chance to absorb new ideas implemented by HKU’s final year students. Talking to the students themselves and learning their stories is especially useful for engineering and research students.

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Disha Jain

Disha Jain is a second year student in Electronics and Communications Engineering at HKU. She is a knowledge-seeker and a Bollywood fanatic. Happiness is her way of life.
disha_j25@hotmail.com

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• Solar Power — The Organic Dimension - April 30, 2014

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Vaibhav Bahadur

A second year student in Computer Engineering at HKU. The kid philosopher, an avid reader, guitar enthusiast and cartoonist.
bahadur.vaibhav@gmail.com

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• A Tour of the HKU M2 Robotics Team Lab - March 30, 2014
• When UBS Holds a Competition - February 5, 2014

Think about going into a shopping mall blindfolded.
Would you be able to find a 7-Eleven just by smelling and listening?

With the E-Guide project under Prof. David W.L. Cheung of the Department of Computer Science at HKU, Visually Impaired (VI) people can feel more accompanied when they visit public places such as shopping malls.

Apart from the smell and noise, they can now rely on an electronic guide without having to guess what is being sold as they enter a shop.

How E-Guide Came to His Mind

Professor Cheung is also the Director of the Center for E-commerce Infrastructure Development (CECID)

Professor Cheung, showing the receiving device in his right hand and the transmitter in his left.

Specially designed braille cover for the blind.

Left: Mr. Patrick K.C. Yee, the project leader.

Transmitters fixed at entrances of stores.

Transmitters placed in shopping malls.

Transmitters being fixed into bus stop signs.

About the Author

James Lam

Second Year, Mechanical Engineering

Deadline Fighter, Lazy King, Interested in Almost Everything

jameslsc@connect.hku.hk

After securing the 9th place in the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge back in June last year, Team HKU has purchased her own Atlas robot and finished 12th in the Miami trials 20 – 21 December 2013.

The software engineering behind the robot is everything. Amongst the team of coders, five were actually undergraduate students.

We sat down with Chim Lee, a year 2 Electrical Engineering local student in the 3-year curriculum, and Rita Liu, a year 2 student from Guangzhou studying Computer Science in the 4-year curriculum, who together with Jacky Yu, Jackie Chan and Tommy Hu, are the undergraduates who helped program the HKU Atlas.

Getting On Board

They had no prior robot programming experiences in their secondary schools. They were invited to join the Atlas team back in March 2013 by Professor Robert C. Roberts, who they had previously consulted when they encountered a postgraduate level question.

“We are both in the M2 robotics team,” said Chim. M2 is the HKU student robotics team. It was a problem that they ran into while programming robots for the M2 team.

To solve the problem, they soon started their own research with their M2 teammates, focusing on the filtering algorithm: the algorithm that removes noise and enable more accurate system control for the robot to move.

And Professor Roberts, impressed with their work and their sound programming knowledge, put their names down on the recruitment shortlist.

Fun with Leap Motion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHLW-TkG7O4
Here’s a video clip of Atlas being the sure-win robot in paper scissor stone. The secret lies with the camera sensors on the robot’s hand. After detecting your hand gesture, the robot will immediately pose its hand to the hand sign that beats yours. Technically, it is cheating because it reads your hand sign before posing its, but that’s in milliseconds, so you don’t even notice it.

Learn As They Go

The hand of Atlas, developed by Sandia National Labs, has 28 degrees of freedom, with many tactile sensors all over its fingers and palm, including two cameras.

This became their full time jobs in the latter half of the last summer vacation. They learnt about the complicated interface of the open source Robot Operating System (ROS), and co-wrote many parts in the controlling of the robot’s right hand.

“It was a bit of C++, a bit of python, a bit of everything. You can use a lot of languages in ROS.”

As always, programs freshly written for a robot, especially one as expensive as the Boston Dynamics Atlas, are first tested on a simulation program before they are run on the robot to avoid damage.

Their work was fun and there was little pressure. They still went back to the laboratory regularly to help out when school started. They both agree that it has been a precious and remarkable experience, working with postgraduate students and professors.

About the Author

James Lam

Regular Contributor

Second Year, Mechanical Engineering

The HKU Atlas Weight (incl. powerpack): 150 kg Height: 1.88 m Power: 480V 3-phase at 15 kW Interface: 10 Gbps Fiber Optic Ethernet, C++ and ROS APIs Price: HK$15 million, includes a maintenance contract

Follow @BostonDynamics A spin-off engineering company from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that specializes in building dynamic robots. See the company’s other robots such as BigDog, PETMAN, RISE, SquishBot, and many others here. The company also develops tools for human simulation. DI-Guy is a human simulation product used for simulation-based training, used by even the US armed forces.

The HKU Advanced Robotics Initiative http://engg.hku.hk/home/robotics/

Atlas’ Housewarming On the HKU u-vision channel: click to watch the video

With the use of the recalibration software, the research team had restored Atlas’ sense of balance.

In fact, four days before the much publicized mishap on the 13rd, Atlas had a problem with his left ankle as well. It was a electrical connector problem separate to that on the 17th. Due to this “nerve damage”, the corresponding actuator misbehaved, driving his ankle, which has 2 DoF(Degree of Freedom), to the extreme rotation. They could not make him walk until the problem was solved.

More Recent Challenges

These maintenance challenges no doubt have a negative effect on Team HKU’s preparations for the upcoming DARPA robotics challenge.

“It was anticipated that these prototypes would have need for fixes, as problems are discovered.” Said Prof. Newman, “we expect that all teams are having similar maintenance challenges.”

Only recently, Atlas has developed yet another problem. Some of the hydraulic seals that keep in the pressurized liquid used to transmit mechanical power, have been ruptured and he was leaking hydraulic fluid rapidly, requiring constant refills.

The leak came at an untimely moment as one of the requirements to enter the DARPA challenge trials this December was to have Atlas demonstrate certain required behaviors in 10-minute runs.

Fortunately, the HKU Atlas managed to run for 10 minutes between hydraulic fluid refills and got itself an assured spot in the competition. Atlas has been serviced to replace the ruptured hydraulic seals since then.

Looking Forward

The countdown to the DARPA showdown is at 39 days now and Team HKU is optimistic about putting on a good show in the States.

In fact, HKU has been doing quite well in terms of software engineering progress. We were the first of the seven competing institutions to get the robot’s head, body and hands all working. In the DARPA simulation trials back in June, Team HKU finished 9th in the world.

Most recently on the university’s Information Day for undergraduate admissions, the Advanced Robotics Laboratory had opened its doors to the public and shown off our Atlas, back in prime shape.

“We are developing the software with CASE Western Reserve, with Tokyo and with Edinburgh… and we are putting ourselves up there with MIT, with Caltech, with Carnegie Mellon.” Said Prof. Newman, “Atlas puts HKU and Asia on the map for robotics.”

Video Footage of the Oct 17th incident from PressTV:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0o7BGYBH58

About the Author

Donald Lam Follow @dtylam

Editor in Chief

Second Year, Computer Science

It has been widely accepted that technology now plays a very important role in education delivery and retention. In the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), Dr. Vincent Tam and Dr. Edmund Lam have been doing extensive research on e-learning deliverables. They discussed with us their projects. A light and fun one called PETAL over the summer; and a larger-scaled research COMPAD+ which has been applied in the learning of all EEE students since last year.

Dr. Vincent Tam

Dr. Edmund Y. Lam

To start, they decided to implement a system which would work on lecture delivery tools. The initial idea was to use the camera to keep ‘an eye’ on the viewer non-invasively.

Dr. Lam clarifies, ‘if the camera can point to you while you are watching an online video, it can extract information about how you respond to the lecture; in more simple terms, if it can detect that you are sleeping, it knows that you got bored.’

They came up with a few scenarios which might be of use. For example, if the camera detects that you are too close to the camera, it might pop-up a warning that you are too close and may be vulnerable to short-sightedness if this behavior continues. It could also detect expressions of being confused, bored or distraction, and pause the video at that point. More importantly, it could be used to extract underlying data about the quality of the lecture.

Dr. Lam mentions one such instance, ‘if the lecture is distributed to 100 students, and 80 of them get bored or confused 10 minutes into the video, then we can send the lecture back to the instructor telling him that maybe you are getting too fast because students are losing sight of what you are trying to say. Hence all these learning analytics information can be extracted non-intrusively without asking the viewers explicit questions.

The technology behind is not new, but this implementation is a very novel idea.

PETAL uses facial recognition algorithms to detect feature changes in expressions. These algorithms were developed with help from OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library), and of course borrowing from the knowledge of Dr. Lam.

PETAL Eye Tracking: Striking a pose

About the Author

Taha Sabih

Regular Contributor

Third Year, Electrical Engineering and Economics