Project Resource: Biofeedback Games

Here is a working list of the project resource for Biofeedback Games. Enjoy browsing through the websites, tutorials, tools, reports. Feel free to comment and add to the list whenever you find useful information.

Our project has been divided into three phases:
Phase I (1) - Brainwave Experiments and Analysis (02/18/2015 - 04/04/2015)
Phase I (2) - Virtual and Real-World Applications (02/18/2015 - 04/04/2015)
Phase II (1) - New Brainwave Applications (04/13/2015 - 05/15/2015)
Phase II (2) - Emotiv Insight Applications (04/13/2015 - 05/15/2015)
Phase III - STEM Show Preparation (05/18/2015 - 06/02/2015)
Advanced STEM Research Show: 3:00 PM 06/03/2015

Project Gantt Chart

1. Gantt Chart PDF (updated on 02/24/2015).
2. Gantt Chart Ganttproject ZIP file (updated on 02/24/2015).

OpenVIBE Resource

1. OpenVIBE Window Installer.
2. OpenVIBE Video Tutorial.
3. OpenVIBE User Document.
4. OpenVIBE Box Documentation. 

NeuroSky Resource

1. Developer Tool.
2. ThinkGear SDK for OS X : Development Guide.
3. NeuroSky Documentation. 
4. Mindwave User Guide.

Development Tools

1. Java JDK.
2. Eclipse.
3. Android Studio. 

OpenVIBE Forums

1. http://openvibe.inria.fr/forum/

Technical Papers

1. OpenViBE: An Open-Source Software Platform to Design, Test and Use Brain-Computer Interfaces in Real and Virtual Environments (2010), Yann Renard, Fabien Lotte, Guillaume Gibert, Marco Congedo, Emmanuel Maby, Vincent Delannoy, Olivier Bertrand, Anatole L ́ecuyer.
2. BCI Could Make Old Two-Player Games Even More Fun (2012), Emmanuel Maby, Margaux Perrin, Olivier Bertrand, Gae ̈tan Sanchez, and Je ́re ́mie Mattout.
3. Comparative Study of Band-Power Extraction Techniques for Motor Imagery Classification (2011), Brodu, N., Lotte, F., Lecuyer, A.
4. Brain-Activity-Driven Real-Time Music Emotive Control (2013), Sergio Giraldo, Rafael Ramirez.
5. An OpenViBE-Based Brainwave Control System for Cerebot (2013), Jing Zhao, Qinghao Meng, Wei Li, Mengfan Li, Fuchun Sun, and Genshe Chen.
   

Theses/Technical Reports

1. Analytic Methods and Workflows for EEG/ERP Domain (2013), Jan Štěbeták.
2. Brain Computer Interfaces (2012), Herbert S. Kisakye.
   
   
   

Project Resource: Drone Delivery System

Here is a working list of the project resource for AR.Drone Delivery System. Enjoy browsing through the websites, tutorials, tools, reports. Feel free to comment and add to the list whenever you find useful information.

Our project has been divided into three phases:
Phase I - Mark/Tag-Guided Drone Delivery System (02/18/2015 - 04/04/2015)
Phase II(1) - Bebop Drone Delivery System (04/13/2015 - 05/15/2015)
Phase II(2) - Vision-Based Drone Delivery System (04/13/2015 - 05/15/2015)
Phase III - STEM Show Preparation (05/18/2015 - 06/02/2015)
Advanced STEM Research Show: 3:00 PM 06/03/2015

Project Gantt Chart

1. Gantt Chart PDF (updated on 02/18/2015).
2. Gantt Chart Ganttproject ZIP file (updated on 02/18/2015).

AR.Drone SDK/Developer Guide

1. AR Drone Developer Guide, Parrot.
2. AR.Drone SDK 2.0.1 Download.
3. ARDrone3 SDK, Parrot.
4. ARDRONE Open API Platform, Parrot. 

Third-Party Tools

1. AutoFlight 0.2 (alpha), LBPC Labs.
2. AutoPylot, Washington and Lee University.
3. URBI, Dronehacks.  
4. Nodecopter, Nodecopter Core.
5. JavaDrone. 
6. ARDroneforP5 (library for Processing). 
7. Ardrone 2.0 Gazebo Simulator, Technical University of Munich.

  Tutorials

1. AR.Drone Tutorials with discussion about OpenCV, Gauth. 
2. Parrot ARDrone 2.0 Video Streaming through OpenCV in Linux, Petr Kout's Physical Science a& Programming.
3. Up and Flying with AR.Drone and ROS with discussion about Tag Detection, Mike Hamer.
4. Make the Drone Following the Image Tag, Drexel University.
5. AR.Drone Video Processing, Ailab and Moto.
6. CVDrone: Color object following using OpenCV, Andy Joiner.
7. Target Tracking with OpenCV, Hugo.  
8. AR Drone ROS setup, Naval Postgraduate School.
9. tum_ardrone: Visual navigation using ROS package:, Computer Vision Group, Technical University of Munich.

OS/Libraries/Platforms/Development Tools

1. OpenCV. 
2. OpenCV IOS.
3. ROS.
4. Gazebo.  
5. Ubuntu.
6. Eclipse.
7. Android Studio. 

AR.Drone Forums

1. http://forum.parrot.com/ardrone/en/
2. https://projects.ardrone.org/projects/ardrone-api/boards
3. http://www.ardrone-flyers.com/

Technical Papers

1. Autonomous Detection And Tracking Of An Object AutonomouslyUsing AR.Drone Quadcopter (2014), Futuhal Arifin, Ricky Arifandi Daniel, and Didit Widiyanto.
2. Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces (2009), Georg Klein and David Murray.
3. Robust Monocular SLAM in Dynamic Environments (2014), Wei Tan, Haomin Liu, Zilong Dong, Guofeng Zhang and Hujun Bao.
4.  Accurate Figure Flying with a Quadrocopter Using Onboard Visual and Inertial Sensing (2012), Jakob Engel, Ju ̈rgen Sturm, Daniel Cremers. 
5. Scale-Aware Navigation of a Low-Cost Quadrocopter with a Monocular Camera (2013), Jakob Engel, Ju ̈rgen Sturm, Daniel Cremers. 
6. Camera-Based Navigation of a Low-Cost Quadrocopter (2012),Jakob Engel, Ju ̈rgen Sturm, Daniel Cremers.

Theses/Dissertations/Reports

1. Autonomous Camera-Based Navigation of a Quadrocopter (2011), Jakob Julian Engel.
2. An Evaluation Of Detection and Recognition Algorithms To Implement Autonomous Target Tracking With A Quadrotor (2013), O.H. Boyers.
3. A.R Drone Vision-Guided Searching (2013), Derek Long.
4. New Idea for Robot (2014), Cheung Chun Yuen, Lam Chun Wai andWong Po Shing.

Doubling the Range of Electric Car Batteries

Two long standing problems with electric cars is their range, how far they can travel on one charge, and the weight of the batteries, which ultimately decreases efficiency. These two problems may have been solved by researchers at Yale University and MIT. They have developed a lithium-air battery that could prove to weigh much less than the conventional LiPo battery and could store up to 10 times as much energy as there predecessors as well as travel and estimated 350 miles which is compressible to gasoline cars. These researchers have discovered a few problems with these air batteries that they hope to solve in the near future. The issue is that the current technology that exists with these batteries limits the potential for rechargeability as well as efficiency. Current is generated in these batteries when lithium ion react with oxygen. When this happens lithium oxide forms a residue on one of the electrodes. To recharge this battery those bonds would have to be broken, which is impossible to do if the electrode is coated in residue. Scientists have developed membranes to try and combat this, but another problem exists which is that the battery only works with pure oxygen, which is clearly not the only gas present in our atmosphere. This battery technology seems to present a promising solution to a huge problem in the field of electric cars, as soon as the last kinks are worked out lithium-air batteries could change the way the world looks at electric vehicles.

Creating a Meltdown Proof Nuclear Reactor

Even before the Fukushima power plant disaster in 2001 people have been rather weary about nuclear power plants. The plants run at disconcertingly high temperatures and produce radioactive waste which can be harmful to the environment if not disposed of properly. Another issue with nuclear power has been the cost of building and running the plants due to the high safety precautions necessary to prevent disaster.
A Canadian company, Terrestrial Energy,  has devised a new way to sue the same reactors in a much safer, efficient, and cleaner manner. The key to this is in the cooling process of the reactor which, as stated before, can reach exorbitantly high temperatures. Instead of cooling the reactors with a heat exchange system using water which must be pumped through the entire plant, this company has drafted designs that use molten salt instead. By using molten salt the energy wasted on pumping water can now be saved, the plant can operate at a higher temperature that burns more efficiently and saves fuel, and the fuel is much easier to recycle and use again in the plant.
The system works by transferring energy in the form of heat in the plant to the molten salt which causes molecules to expand and slows fission thus reducing the heat of the fuel. Furthermore, since the salt is rather viscus, if there were to be a rupture in the plant the salt would solidify, limiting the area that could be contaminated.
The use of nuclear technology is one that must be explored and advancements like these can easily justify why we should be implementing more advanced way to use it rather than abandoning it.

A New New Form of Silicon Could Lead to Ultra Fast Transistors

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found a new material similar to silicon that could revolutionize the computer chip industry. This material consists of a sheet of silicon that is only one atomic layer thick, it is called silicene. The idea behind silicene is that due to it's extremely thin structure the material has fantastic properties for transferring electricity around. Being only one atom thick the silicene becomes a highway for electrons to transmit data for a ultra high speed computer chip. This material is similar to graphene which is a two atom thick variant of carbon except being that it is only one atom think it is even faster theoretically. The only problem so far is that because silicene is so thin it is unstable to the point where it is near impossible to work with and contain. At UT Austin a computer engineer by the name of Deji Akinwande discovereed that by making silicene on a think layer of silver, the material would survive with some stability in a vacuum. Although this is not ideal for commercial production, it is the first step in a what could be the new age of micro processors.

New Pill With the Ability to Reverse Aging

Since the dawn of civilization people have been fascinated with the idea of immortality and have concocted infinite ways to reverse the process of aging. A new pharmaceutical company by the name Elysium Health believes that they have found a way to actually reverse the aging process in humans. 

The drug, Basis, "is a chemical precursor to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD" This compound is one that has a similar effect to a low calorie diet, which is proven to reverse aging in mice. The drug has been proven to have these effects on mice and worms but is nearly impossible to prove, in a reasonable time span, whether the drug will actually have the intended effect on people. This means that there is no guarantee that the product, a small blue pill taken twice daily, will even work. In order to get as many people taking the pill as quickly as possible, the company has chosen to label Basis as a over the counter nutritional supplement so as to bypass FDA testing an regulations. 

The field of NAD research is one of the most exciting facets of STEM research right now. If these pills actually work on people it could have the potential to revolutionize the way we live and die.

YouTube and HTML5

YouTube has been using HTML5 video for years, but it was limited to mobile platforms that do not support Adobe Flash, like iOS, the iPhone's operating system. The thing that make HTML5 so special is that it not only has adaptive bitrate, which allows the video quality to change depending on the internet connection strength, therefore removing little or all of the much dreaded "buffering circle" that people hate so much but also support of the open-source VP9 video codec which supports streaming of videos at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second permitted that the system can handle it. However, the biggest advantage that HTML5 has over Adobe's Flash is that unlike Flash, HTML5 does not require extra plugins or software (internet is written with HTML5), which means that increased security. Third party applications like Adobe Flash allow weak spots for hackers to target, by removing the use of third party applications and plugins, powerhouses like Google and Apple can disintegrate the incorporation of Flash and prevent said attack. The time spent on integrating Flash can now be spend doing something else like improving the security and quality of their services. Recent versions of Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox will start receiving HTML5 by default.

Herbal Supplement...or Not?

New York Times reports from the Attorney General's Office that many of the reported Herbal supplements do not actually contain any of the listed substances. In the United States, supplements have little to no regulation. Meaning, many of these herbal supplemental manufacturers can put anything they want in a capsule and label it what ever they want. At Walmart, the authorities found that ginkgo biloba, a Chinese plant product that supposedly promotes memory, contains none of the actual product but rather powdered radish, houseplants, and wheat. In order to test this, the Attorney General's Office used DNA fingerprinting to match the DNA of claimed product with the DNA barcode of the actual product. Although the president of the American Herbal Association argues that "processing during manufacturing of botanical supplements can remove of damage DNA", which is true. It still does not explain why the ingredients in the supplements are not listed on the bottle.

Talk for Twice as Long With this New Battery

As technology in the mobile electronics industry has advanced, so has the technology inside the batteries that power these devices. For a long period of time the battery of choice for most electronics producers was one made out of an alloy of nickel and cadmium (NiCd). NiCd batteries are not particularly efficient and manufacturers have been looking for a solution for years. The answer to NiCd batteries was thought to be in Lithium Ion technology (LiPo). The only problem with LiPo batteries is that the are highly unpredictable and tend to catch fire or stop working under certain conditions.
Solid Energy believes that they have found a solution to this unpredictability in LiPo batteries, thus rendering them safe enough to use in consumer electronics. In the past, lithium batteries have tended to react with metal components used in their construction. These reactions form compounds which cause the battery to short circuit and release enough energy to ignite the combustable liquid electrolytes. The solution to this problem in the past has been to replace the "wet cell" electrolytes with "dry cell" electrolytes that do not short circuit. The only problem is that the solid electrolytes used are much less efficient than their liquid counterparts.
To solve this problem Solid Energy has created somewhat of a hybrid battery, in that it uses both dry and wet systems. A thin layer of lithium foil is added in between the liquid electrolytes thus separating them from the lithium walls of the battery's cells. Although this technology is still in it's early stages, it is possible that something like this could be implemented in bigger electronics and eventually cars and machinery.

Artificial blood vessels: Tri-layered artificial blood vessels for first time

By combining micro-imprinting and electro-spinning techniques, researchers have developed a vascular graft composed of three layers for the first time. This tri-layered composite has allowed researchers to utilize separate materials that respectively possess mechanical strength and promote new cell growth - a significant problem for existing vascular grafts that have only consisted of a single or double layer.

More on this here

Magnetic sense for humans? Electronic skin with magneto-sensory system enables 'sixth sense'

Scientists from Germany and Japan have developed a new magnetic sensor, which is thin, robust and pliable enough to be smoothly adapted to human skin, even to the most flexible part of the human palm. The achievement suggests it may be possible to equip humans with magnetic sense.




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Brain circuit that controls compulsive overeating and sugar addiction discovered

Compulsive overeating and sugar addiction are major threats to human health, but potential treatments face the risk of impairing normal feeding behaviors that are crucial for survival. A new study reveals a reward-related neural circuit that specifically controls compulsive sugar consumption in mice without preventing feeding necessary for survival, providing a novel target for the safe and effective treatment of compulsive overeating in humans.

More on this here