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Inspiration from Hollywood

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Internet of Things: Sensing and Actuation From Devices

University of California San Diego

4.3 (88 ratings) | 14K Students Enrolled

Have you wondered how information from physical devices in the real world gets communicated to Smartphone processors? Do you want to make informed design decisions about sampling frequencies and bit-width requirements for various kinds of sensors? Do you want to gain expertise to affect the real world with actuators such as stepper motors, LEDs and generate notifications? In this course, you will learn to interface common sensors and actuators to the DragonBoard™ 410c hardware. You will then develop software to acquire sensory data, process the data and actuate stepper motors, LEDs, etc. for use in mobile-enabled products. Along the way, you’ll learn to apply both analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion concepts. Learning Goals: After completing this course, you will be able to: 1. Estimate sampling frequency and bit-width required for different sensors. 2. Program GPIOs (general purpose input/output pins) to enable communication between the DragonBoard 410c and common sensors. 3. Write data acquisition code for sensors such as passive and active infrared (IR) sensors, microphones, cameras, GPS, accelerometers, ultrasonic sensors, etc. 4. Write applications that process sensor data and take specific actions, such as stepper motors, LED matrices for digital signage and gaming, etc.

Reviews

4.3 (88 ratings)

5 stars
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4 stars
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3 stars
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JC

Feb 09, 2018

Excellent, I recommend this course and specialization.

HK

Aug 29, 2017

A very good foundation course on sensing and actuation

From the lesson

Course 3 Lecture series

Before jumping into the lab section of this course, we would like to offer you a short lecture series. This lecture series will compliment everything you are about to do for the remainder of the course.

Introduction to the Lectures1:53

What's in Sensor6:38

Sensing and Actuation Paradigms5:21

Inspiration from Hollywood8:08

Discrete Signals and digital Signal Processing12:10

Life below the Nyquist (Advanced)7:05

Resolution, Bandwidth, and Power7:50

Taught By

Ganz Chockalingam
Principal Engineer
Harinath Garudadri
Associate Research Scientist

Transcript

So I have been harping about 120 year old technologies.

The old telephone, the Internet, how they all converge to the IOT platform.

I would be reminiscent if I did not talk about the future

potential of all of these tools.

One of the cutting-edge technologies that is very active in the academia and

some established and upcoming start-ups,

is augmenting the human sensing and human performance.

I did not explain this in the previous slides so let's spend a couple of minutes

on this, and I just want to paint the potential

of where you could take the sensing and accuration paradigm.

So we have five major senses.

Hearing, vision, taste, smell and touch.

And the fact of the matter is we do not quite understand how

all of these things work independently and together,

especially at the cortical level, cognitive science in the brain.

The rollover brain place in making sense of all of this is

still somewhat an enigma.

So what if we did crack this?

What if we are able to in part some of these capabilities and

knowledge to the missions that we can build?

Of all the complex interplace of the census,

I found that balance is the most puzzling one.

So let's take balance as the X factor.

It's a very, very complex motor skill

that we acquire in the first one to two years of age.

Nobody teaches us, we just naturally learn it by ourselves.

Then, we go on to display incredible competence for decades after that.

This is the New York Giants Dallas Cowboys game in last November, 2014.

And Odell Beckham had this real circus-like touchdown, bending backwards.

And it's really, really incredible.

How do we do these things?

And again, around the age of 65 years of old,

our balance competence starts to decrease, and

you invariably need some assistive device in order to

carry on your activities of daily living.

ADL is the acronym people use.

So that you can prevent falls.

It turns out that balance competence is

proportional to the risk of falls.

The greater competence you have, the lower are the fall risks, and

this is well-documented in clinical research.

Another factor is gate defenses, as your walking,

if suddenly there's longterm changes in your gate patterns.

If you detect that, you can detect for

risks weeks or months before the fall actually happens.

This is one of the hypothesis that we are currently working on.

And the cost of falls is $34 billion in 2013,

and CDC estimates that it will go to $55 billion in 2020.

These are incredible numbers, but the most

important message in this that I found was the impact on the quality of life.

That is priceless.

Once people fall, one in four die within one year,

and for the 75% who survive, the quality of life is impacted very, very badly.

So where I'm getting with all this is [COUGH] balance.

It's such a simple thing that we all take for granted.

Is a very, very complex mechanism.

Here's the cartoon representation of the balance system.

[COUGH] The take away message is how all this complex sensory,

multiple sensory systems and multiple activators

are interacting with the brain in a very complex processing.

So to start with, we have [COUGH] two eyes for 3D imaging of the scene around us.

Then, there is something call vestibulo-ocular reflex.

That is the combination of the ear's hearing and

the vision to stabilize the scene as we move.

And the way this is done is, there are five senses in each ear.

The three semi-circular canals and saccule and utricle.

They tell the brain about the 3D orientation,

gravity, and the acceleration.

Then, there are multiple joints in the feet, the ankles, knees, and

hips and the skin on the feet.

These all form proprioceptive sensing.

So these three major sensing systems provide information on

the actual orientation of us.

And in the sensory association cortices, the computing error that

the desired orientation that we want, and the actual orientation.

And then, we issue motor commands to change the orientation

to the muscular skeletal system.

The muscular skeletal system changes the orientation ever so

slightly, and like deja vu, this cycle starts all over again.

There are multiple feed back time constants that are at play here.

Diseases of the sensory organs like sight needing to wear glasses,

hearing, fatigue in the neuromuscular system,

neurodegenerative disorders, parkinson's,

alzheimer's, all of these can and do affect our balance.

It's not uncommon for people with these disorders, in the hospital,

to go for multiple rounds before these things are actually diagnosed and cheated.

[COUGH] There are already some devices

in the market that actually use de-sensing and

actuation, to improve the human performance to augment

the loss of sensory or the muscular system.

I should have put Google glasses on this.

I missed on that, but in the IOT platform our

vision is we can build a lot more advanced systems.

In some sense, the systems that we can fill, build, are not very far from

the science fiction from Hollywood and the common literature.

All you need to do is look at Buck Rogers, Ironman, Terminator, Bionic Woman and

the possibilities are Endless.

So we hope we will see some very good capstone projects coming out of this

course.

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