Here is a blog on my weekend.
On 11th May, 1998 India achieved a major technological breakthrough by successfully carrying out nuclear tests at Pokhran. Also first, indigenous aircraft "Hansa-3" was test flown at Bangalore on this day and India also performed successful test firing of the Trishul missile on the same day. Considering these technological achievements on a particular date i.e. 11th May, the day of 11th May was chosen to be commemorated as National Technology Day.
On account of National Technology Day, there was an exhibition of BARC technologies in the field of Electronics and Computers held on the weekend. There were around 34 amazing exhibits under the theme Electronics and Computer Technology- Empowering the Nation.
Just to throw some light on few of the projects:
- Seeker for BrahMos Missile
- Missile hits the target but the target is also intelligent enough to predict an attack and shift its position. Controlling the target is not in our hands (obviously, because it is the enemy) but what we could rather be doing is detect the moving target and hit it at the right coordinate. So this seeker which is located at the apex of the missile does this job. It is actually a transceiver which works on monopulse detection method and then applying some ratiometric analysis the coordinates of the target is determined with great accuracy.
- Robot assisted Neuro Navigation and Neurosurgical Suite
- For a normal surgery to be carried out the doctor needs to cut open a part of the skull so that it can be seen properly inside while performing the surgery. Whereas the idea of this project lies in finding out the coordinates inside the skull where the operation needs to be done through normal CT scan and then making a very small hole just so that the surgical needle gets in. There are certain markers like reference points that would assist in getting the needle to the right position. Now all this can be viewed onto the monitor and the doctor can see how the robotic arm with the needle is moving into the hole and inside the skull. And this monitor image of the skull can be cross sectioned in whichever way so that the doctor gets the idea of inside the skull without actually performing the cross section on the patient. This whole task could be either automated or performed manually depending upon the surgical requirements. This was developed on ROS (Robotic Operating System) environment. I wish I could have clicked pictures of the demonstration to give you all a better idea.
- 12 Channel Tele-ECG
- I'll directly share the youtube link of the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-NNSJmVoAM
- Digital Medical Imaging System
- Through conventional X-Rays a film is produced which is then examined by the doctors. But with this a digital image of the X-Ray is produced directly onto the computer which can be sent to the doctor anywhere. For different examination purposes different types of machines are required like for angiography, radiography, tomography etc. So this is like one machine for all purpose. It is like a bed where the patient lies and from below it the X-Rays are emitted. There is a flat panel which is a stack of multiple layers performing different functions on the top where the X-rays are received. The first layer being the scintillator which converts x-rays to light and then there is a CCD (charge coupled device) layer which can convert the analog light signal to digital output that can be given to the computer. Even taking X-ray videos becomes easy. Not saying that this technology doesn't exist, there are big hospitals that have it installed but the specialty of this product lies in being indigenous and being really affordable.
- Electronic Nose
- This device imitates a nose by detecting the presence of different gases. It has a sensor array with each segment being a different semiconductor composition in order to detect a particular gas. Like the segment having Sn02:CuO film can detect H2S gas. It is basically a chemiresistive sensor. When H2S reacts with this film CuS is formed which is metallic and hence electrical resistance changes, this change is calibrated and recorded as concentration in ppm. This is a reversible reaction because of which it can be reused. On the similar line other segments in the sensor array also work for different gases. A particular gas can also be detected by multiple segments and so in such case PCA(Principle Component Analysis) is carried out to determine the gas.
- Application of Signal Processing in Health Monitoring of Buried Oil pipelines
- There is a caterpillar like device which is inserted from one end of the pipeline and taken out to process the data it collected throughout its journey from the other end. It works on the principle of detecting change in magnetic flux and eddy current using hall effect sensors. It is an in house system having a magnetic module, DAQ(data acquisition system) and power module inbuilt. When there is a crack the magnetic flux increases so this way the data is recorded and health is monitored.
- Object Identification and Face Detection
- If you had read my previous post then this is just an application of Neural networks. The training data which identified 80 different objects was taken from Microsoft coco database. Normally for images CNN(convolutional neural networks) becomes handy and hence that idea was only applied. Backpropagation algorithm was used for the training. The training took about 200 hrs that too on GPUs! Idea being each pixel value is given to a separate input neuron and the output layer has 80 neurons to detect the probability of 80 different objects. The number of hidden layers and the number on neurons in each layer is a matter of trial and error. Once the training is done and the correct weights of the neural net are recorded, this architecture can be passed onto any other device like a mobile and now if any random image is provided then it can easily detect which object it is within just 5-10 secs.
- Depth estimation and application in Robotics
- Depth estimation is a fundamental problem in robotics and computer vision. This project used Laser assisted Stereo Vision. We have two eyes for a purpose and that is to realize the depth. Also if we view an object which is placed near from only one eye and then close that eye and view it from other eye, the shift in the object is more compared to when the object is placed far away (try it out yourself). Stereo cameras are used generally for depth estimation but with the disadvantage of being very difficult to calibrate whereas using laser would be very helpful here. For the algorithm building various principles were used like triangulation principle and time of flight principle and the shift or the error was estimated and a depth map was generated. The end product was a cart having a laser beam generator and detector with a span of 0 to 270 degree and as it navigates it generates the map of the whole area on the screen using Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) method. All this was developed on ROS (distributed system).
- X-Ray 3D Computed Tomography for Non-destructive Evaluation
- The idea in one sentence is taking X-Ray images that are grey scale images at different angles and by applying some back-projection algorithm the whole volume of the object is constructed. This can be performed using VTK software.
- Cyber Security Monitoring in BARC
- Handheld Biosensor for detecting Methyl Parathion Pesticides
- Body Composition Analyser
- Speech Analytics with Machine Learning
- Aerial Radiation Monitoring Systems
- Real time intelligent perimeter intrusion detection system
Cheers!!
