Category:Projects -Research and Education

This webpage is provided so that Researchers, Students and Professors using the Gumstix OpenEmbedded build system can showcase their Gumstix based projects, and pass on links to other sources of information and materials. This information is entirely user generated and supported.

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2012

University of Waterloo Micro-Aerial Vehicles in Ontario, Canada

UWMAV uses Gumstix Overo COMs as the brains for their autopilot vision system. The COMs preform various computer vision algorithms to accomplish autonomous flight.

2011

Stanford Aero & Astro Laboratory in California, USA

The Aerospace Robotics Laboratory is a research group in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. Research in the ARL focuses on improving robotic performance through the application of feedback control, integrated sensing systems, and task-level autonomy. All of the research is developed and validated on experimental hardware systems. These systems include both mobile robots (land, sea, sky, and space) and a variety of fixed manipulators for space and factory applications.

Sandia National Laboratories in California, USA

Sandia National Labs in California aims to boot a million virtual machines on large, high-end supercomputers. Their initial project is a cluster of 196 x Gumstix Overo COMs in a project called Mega Tux.

2010

International Space University in Strasbourg, France

A team of three students at the International Space University have developed a Gumstix-powered experiment to track aircraft from a balloon-platform in the stratosphere. The experiment, called I-BATE (ISU-Balloon Air-Traffic control Experiment), will launch the second week of October 2010 (weather permitting) from Esrange Space Center in the Swedish arctic. There are three main components of the experiment: 1) a receiver provided by Kinetic Avionics, which listens to a plane's transponder beacon using a system called ADS-B, 2) a custom designed board that regulates and distributes power and also controls the temperatures of various components, and 3) an Overo Earth mounted on a Tobi expansion board that stores the aircraft signals and relays it in real-time to the ground via the balloon's ethernet telemetry system.

I-BATE hopes to prove the feasibility of space-based air-traffic management to mitigate air-traffic congestion and to make air travel safer. The balloon launch is provided by a program called BEXUS, realised under a bilateral Agency Agreement between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB). The Swedish share of the payload has been made available to students from other European countries through a collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA). More information on I-BATE can be found on their website. BEXUS information can be found on the BEXUS website.

Aberystwyth University in Wales

Aberystwyth University Intelligent Robotics Group presents Pinta - the Autonomous Sailing Robot. Pinta is a modified Topper Taz sailing dingy fitted out to be computer controllable.

Pinta was designed for the Microtransat Challenge - a transatlantic race of fully autonomous sailing boats in September 2010 that starts in Valentia, County Kerry, Ireland. The race aims to stimulate the development of autonomous sailing boats through friendly competition. The finish line will be along the line of 60 degrees West, between 10 and 25 degrees North. Each team must designate a 50km wide point centred on this line to which they are aiming.

Pinta's control system runs on a Gumstix computer and PIC microcontroller and uses GPS, compass, wind and battery sensors to help it sail to a series of GPS waypoints.

Visit the Microtransat website to track Pinta's progress and watch their video on Youtube here.

Carnegie Mellon University in United States

The CMU Scout development team is back, demonstrating ing one of several suspension tests as part of the Scout proving grounds.

They are also in the process of prototyping their Gumstix-based computing board!

Colony Scout website here. Robotics Club website here.

Watch their Youtube video via this link

University of Aarhus in Denmark

Alexandru Csete, also known as OZ9AEC, is a physicist from the University of Aarhus doing experiments with Gumstix Overo. Alexandru also works as an all round nerd at Rovsing A/S usually in projects within the European space industry.

King Abdullah University of Science & Technology in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, vis Stanford

Yasser Khan is developing a Wireless Embedded Control System for Atomically Precise Manufacturing – to achieve the highest degree of precision possible, and ideally leading to atomically identical structures.

2009

Gumstix in Universities across North America

Carnegie Mellon (USA) developed an undergrad course on embedded real-time systems

Priya Narasimhan: "we're running our core undergrad embedded real-time systems course based on the gumstix. We had great success with using the gumstix, and I continued to use it for our senior capstone course as well.

Our class has 130 juniors and seniors (twice the enrollment as last year, which is a good thing ;-)."

   Priya Narasimhan
   Associate Professor
   Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
   Carnegie Mellon University
   Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890

MIT Space Elevator Team

MIT Space Elevator Team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is using GumStix hardware in their beam powered climber. The climber will be competing in the NASA Centennial Space Elevator Challenge.

MIT Cerebro mesh network

Cerebro is a scalable, light-weight platform that allows 802.11b/g devices to form a mesh network and offers presence information, exchange information without an operator or a network connection.

NetBEAMS (Networked Bay Environmental Assessment Monitoring System)

NetBEAMS/ (Networked Bay Environmental Assessment Monitoring System builds an end-to-end application for viewing measurements in real-time from probes distributed throughout the San Francisco Bay.

Stanford AI Lab, California research on Artificial Intelligence

Tim Hunter and his group are using Overo for research at the Stanford AI Lab]

Stanford Computer Graphics Lab, California and the Camera 2.0 project

My research group is working with researchers from Adobe and Nokia on a project called camera 2.0, which is an effort to create hardware and software architectures for cameras that are programmable to the lowest levels. With such programmability, we hope to take much of the recent research in computational photography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography), done originally with DSLR cameras on tripods and in laboratory conditions, and apply it to real hand-held camera systems. One of requirements for that is to have fast, direct access to the sensor to allow for tight low-level control loops for systems such as autofocus or synchronization with flashes or other odd hardware.

An OMAP3530 looks to be a nearly-ideal processing platform for such a camera, since it is tightly integrated but still has substantial processing power - our current prototype forces us to program heavy-duty processing code on an FPGA, which is quite laborious.

Contact: Eino-Ville (Eddy) Talvala, Graduate Research Assistant, Stanford Computer Graphics Lab

UC Berkeley doing river current research

A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley trying to learn more about the river currents in the delta.

The researchers are working with propelled 4-foot-long submarines and floating drifters equipped with GPS-receivers for positioning, GSM-modules for communication, and sensors inside for recording temperature, salinity, and currents.

More here.

University of Massachusetts Amherst's remote monitoring of riverbed ecosystems

Rivernet is a wireless sensor network for remote monitoring of riverbed ecosystems. More here.

Gumstix in Universities outside North America

Pixhawk: Micro Air Vehicle Computer Vision Platform

The Pixhawk project offers students the possibility to do a hands-on semester or masters thesis in the Pixhawk lab. In contrast to other typical semester theses, this practicum will include a lot more practical work directly on the micro helicopter. Students will have the opportunity to directly test their algorithms on the micro helicopter or on one of the hardware prototyping platforms.

For more information, click here.

University of Southampton: measuring glaciers in Iceland

Kirk and his Glacsweb team have a PXA255-based Gumstix connex computer sitting on a Iceland in Edmonton measuring the depth of the glacier.

Electronics and Computer Science are testing Gumstix for various sensor networks, pervasive and robotics projects. This includes a gumsense board for I/O to sensors.

Aberystwyth University: Aberystwyth, Wales, UK and a transatlantic autonomous sailing boat

Aberystwyth University Department of Computer Science is using gumstix in several sailing robots. These are being used to autonomously perform oceanography and to compete in the Microtransat Challenge a transatlantic autonomous boat race.

• Sailing Robot research using the Gumstix

NICTA and the University of New South Wales, Australia developed a clarinet-playing robot

Australian research group NICTA and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have developed a clarinet-playing robot that runs Linux. The "Robo-Clarinet" won first prize at the Artemis Music Orchestra competition for autonomous, embedded musical instrument performances.

More here.

2008 and earlier

Gumstix in Universities across North America

Arizona State University: Tempe, AZ

ENIPS Project (Embedded Network Intrusion & Detection System) started at CABIT Research Lab at Arizona State University in June 05. The project is to build an intrusion detection and prevention system in one tiny box, size of a cellphone, that is itself secure(transparent), robust and easy to manage.

• Website: Enips
• Contact: Weqaar Janjua <janjua@asu.edu>

Stanford University: Palo Alto, CA

Deanna Stewart is part of a student group ("Firehose") in the college of the Management of Science and Engineering. Deanna & Patrick & Brent & Brian & Anton (aka Firehose) have completed their study on creativity in the workplace, including studying the gumstix management team.

University of British Columbia: Vancouver, Canada

APSC 486 APSC 486 - New Venture Design is a one-year long joint course taught between Electrical Engineering and the Sauder School of Business in which students conceive and develop a realistic commercial product. Three APSC 486 students are using the Gumstix to implement a Bt-enabled cellphone peripheral.

For more on the gumstix at UBC, contact Prof. Dave Michelson

Clemson University: Clemson, SC

Gumstix are being used to gather data from wireless sensor networks out in the field and send it to our lab via Meteor Burst modem.

Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY

We are using gumstix for a portable equipment for measurement of fluorescence. The gumstix controls light intensity, temperature and sequences the fluid handling steppers+pumps. It also does analysis of the data and displays the results on a small LCD display.

• Website

Utah State University: Logan, UT

Using the Gumsitx to develop an advanced Laser Tag system that uses both GPS and wireless communication to enhance gameplay.

• SECS Project

Florida International University: Miami, Florida

Florida International University's IEEE Student Branch Robotics Team is using Gumstix and Robostix to create an object recognizing rover for the 2008 IEEE Hardware Competition. Inquiries can be made to Chris Rodriguez <Crodr021@fiu.edu>

Gumstix in Universities & Tehnical Institutes outside North America

Reading University: Reading, UK

Dan Taylor's PhD focusses on detecting faults in supermarket fridges using artificial immune systems and evolutionary neural networks of various types project. He has various projects starting up involving the gumstix motherboard. More to come from Dan.

• PhD site

Technical University of Cluj Napoca: Cluj Napoca, Romania

Radu Bogdan Rusu is in the Faculty of Automation & Computer Science as a PhD student.

Update: Radu moved to the Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Intelligent Autonomous Systems research group (Computer Science department IX).

• PhD site

University of Deusto, Spain

Juan Ignacio Vazquez is doing research about embedding Semantic Web technologies into Ubiquitous Computing platforms in order to create more intelligent, perceptive and reactive devices. The prototypes are called smobjects (smart objects): intelligent agents that exchange semantically annotated information in order to create a shared knowledge space about the environment. Smobjects can spontaneously discover each other and be configured with high-level behaviors using appropriate vocabularies and ontologies.

One of the prototypes is a talking plant integrated in the environment, aware of existing conditions (e.g. dangerous or flammable materials) alerting the user about any existing hazard. Other prototype is a weather-aware umbrella that discovers surrounding sources of weather data (such as a rain sensor or an Internet connection to download a weather forecast), blinking if the user intends to leave home without it (if needed).

• awareIT.com (PhD site)