From preventing wildfires to detecting landmines, the humanitarian goals of senior design team projects led by Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) professor Qiliang Li have drawn acclaim in the department.
“We want the students to take care of and to care more about humanity, to consider how we can apply engineering and technology in more constructive ways [such as] saving lives,” said Li. This year, his team tackled a compelling question: “How can we clear landmines so that people can go back to their own land and are able to live in their place, their homeland?”
Li saw this year’s project as an opportunity for students in his electromagnetic theory class to apply the information from his class, learn how to build a system independently, and consider the potential positive societal impact of engineering. The team—Elise Treat, Grace Louise Gaudin, Isaac Lunsford, Mazeyar Amiri, Adrian Lange, and Sami Zahreddine—developed a synthetic aperture radar system with a low size, weight, and power system (Low SWaP SAR) to use Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to detect buried landmines.
“Their radar is basically sending an electromagnetic wave out to the to the land,” he explained. “They receive a wave from the refraction off the land—off the surface and any object underneath the soil—so by analyzing it, the students are able to detect the landmine.”
Along with teams led by ECE professors Brian Mark, and Cameron Nowzari, respectively, the project was sponsored by the Army Strategic Program for Innovation, Research, and Employment (ASPIRE), which afforded the team multiple opportunities to present their research to peers and experienced researchers. The team also presented within the ECE department at the end of the academic year, the culmination of the yearlong project.
“The senior design capstone students put a lot of effort into building a project like this; they build hardware, and they write the software to drive the hardware as a system and then gather results. Then, they explain how they designed the system and how these results are important. In other words, how these results are novel in comparison to ongoing research in the field,” Li noted. For the second year in a row, the senior design team working under Li's guidance won the best senior design award in the department.
Li hopes future senior design teams will continue the research from this year’s project. This project is itself an extension of a prior team’s work. Li’s prior team used a large power radar system, albeit with different circuit designs for long distance remote sensing, to assess changing landscape morphology of say, a mountain being affected by a wildfire.
“Last year’s team was more focusing on objects on the land, above the land, for example, the woods and vehicles,” Li explained. This year, Li encouraged his team to focus on finding object under the ground that constitute a serious humanitarian problem: landmines left behind in old battlefields. This year’s team thus needed to focus especially on the refraction of light from soil.
Li hopes future teams will build off the work done this year by using radar to study soil quality to assist farmers.
“If you're able to use radar carried by drones, you’d be able to help the farmer to detect the soil quality at a large scale. They would not need to go over there and take the soil and go to the lab and analyze the chemical composition.”