This paper reports the development of a practical visible light positioning (VLP) system using received signal strength. The indoor localization system is accurate and easy to train and calibrate despite using fingerprinting technique. The VLP system consists of cheap photodiode-based receiver and consumer grade LED luminaires. The impact of distance metrics used to compute the weights of the weighted K-nearest neighbor (WKNN) algorithm on the localization accuracy of the VLP is investigated. Experimental results show that square chord distance is the most robust and accurate metric and significantly outperforms the commonly used Euclidean distance metric. A room-scale implementation shows that a mean error of 2.2 cm and a 90-percentile error of 4.9 cm within a 3.3 m × 2.1 m 2-D floor space are achievable. However, the high localization accuracy comes at the cost of requiring 187 offline measurements to construct the fingerprint database. A method for estimating an optical propagation model using only a handful of measurements is developed to address this problem. This leads to the creation of a dense and accurate fingerprinting database through fabricated data. The performance of the VLP system does not degrade noticeably when the localization is performed with the fabricated data. A mean error of 2.7 cm and a 90-percentile error of 5.7 cm are achievable with only 12 offline measurements.

This paper reports on the development of an ultrasonic sensing-based active localization system. The system employs an ultrasonic array to transmit chirp signals and time-of-flight measurement for ranging. The position of the receiver is estimated iteratively using the spring-relaxation technique. A median and 90-percentile error of 12.4 and 21.7 mm, respectively, were obtained for measurements at 625 positions within a 1.2 m × 1.2 m area testbed. The spring-relaxation technique outperforms the widely adopted linear least square-based lateration technique while using the same ranging data. The performance of the system is benchmarked against that of visible light positioning using the same platform setup. The reported results show the ultrasonic system to be more accurate when compared with the visible light positioning system, which achieved median and 90-percentile errors of 33.7 and 58.6 mm, respectively.

Aiming to better prepare engineering graduates for challenges of practical real-world engineering job, the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering and the School of Engineering of Monash University in Robotics and Electronics have jointly introduced several teaching units (subjects) solely based on a team project learning approach. This paper presents and discusses one of them - the third-year Engineering Design unit. It is based on a team project work covering such areas as Robotics, Electrical and Electronic design, Sensing, Instrumentation and Measurement, Computing, Communications, as well as Project Management, Report Writing, Technical Presentation and Robotics Competition.

This paper presents a low cost automatic inspection system aimed at monitoring of the quality of pharmaceutical products on a production line. The system is built around a smart camera and custom designed LabVIEW based software. It is capable of detecting multiple defects of various types.

Visible light positioning or VLP has been identified as a promising technique for accurate indoor localization utilizing pre-existing lighting infrastructure. Robot navigation is one of the many potential applications of VLP. Recent literature shows a small number of works on robots being controlled by fusing location information acquired via VLP that uses a rolling shutter effect camera as a receiver with other sensor data. This paper, in contrast, reports on the experimental performance of a cartesian robot that was controlled solely by a VLP system using a cheap photodiode-based receiver rigidly attached to the robot’s end-effector. The receiver’s position was computed using an inverse-Lambertian function for ranging followed by multi-lateration. We developed two novel methods to leverage the VLP as an online navigation system to control the robot. The position acquired from the VLP was used by the algorithms to determine the direction the robot needed to move. The developed algorithms guided the end-effector to move from a starting point to target/destination point(s) in a discrete manner, determined by a pre-determined step size. Our experiments consisted of the robot autonomously repeating straight line-, square- and butterfly-shaped paths multiple times. The results show median errors of 27.16 mm and 26.05 mm and 90 percentile errors of 37.04 mm and 47.48 mm, respectively, for the two methods.

IEEE Region 10 is home to some of the world’s largest semiconductor design and manufacturing facilities. Electronic testing is a branch of a wide instrumentation and measurement field. It plays a key role in verifying and improving quality and functionality of the fabricated integrated circuits as well as in refining the manufacturing process so to reach a required high yield. However, the continuing shortage of qualified engineers in the test, failure analysis, instrumentation and measurement areas in the electronic industry and associated R&D organizations, makes it hard to cover the required production operations. Addressing the need, an integrated specialist education program in the Electronic Test Technology was developed and implemented by a team of university academics in cooperation and with support from management and engineering specialists of several leading electronic companies. The program was also sponsored by the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Faculty Course Development Award. The paper presents the summary of the developed contents of the teaching and training components. It also outlines the designed laboratory systems, and provides the feedback received from the students and industry.