When the robot vacuum cleaner retreats to its charging station with an empty battery, it almost seems alive – a well-deserved rest after a day's work. Such "behavior" makes it easy for people to accept inanimate helpers in everyday life, but behind it lies complex programmeming, sophisticated design, and a great deal of engineering. Students in the Master's programme "Control, Computer and Communications Engineering" at the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen (THM) have been working on "siblings" of the vacuum cleaner as part of a project.
The CCCE-acronym, an internationally oriented and therefore entirely English-language Master's programme, is offered in Friedberg and forms a synergy of subfields of communication engineering, control engineering, and computer engineering, focusing on the development of safety-critical, networked, intelligent, electrotechnical systems. Constructing examples of such systems was the task formulated by programme directors Prof. Dr. Andreas Penirschke, Prof. Alexander Kuznietsov, and Prof. Dr. Fabian Mink for a final project.
The presented projects varied considerably – all required the construction of something new from existing components. The concept of the "Internet of Things" was central: all projects had to be operable wirelessly from the THM network. One group chose a popular hobby drone with the goal of enabling it to fly autonomously to a wireless charging station. They quickly discovered that failure can also be part of a successful exam task: since the drone wasn't designed for wireless charging, this component – along with those for orientation and imaging – had to be retrofitted. However, it was heavier than the drone's maximum payload. Therefore, the team had to concentrate on precise landings, a challenge compounded by the limited reliability of the installed components. The proof of concept was achieved, along with the realization that feasibility and reliability are always also a matter of cost.
A group of researchers transformed a standard, radio-controlled toy car into a tool for agriculture: Equipped with additional hardware and custom programmeming based on open-source software, it can transmit video, humidity, and temperature data while driving, linked to precise GPS coordinates. Thanks to its modular design, further sensors can be easily integrated. The team envisions a potential application for monitoring vegetation conditions on farmland, but many other uses are also conceivable with modifications.
The third group focused on an application that could be used in teaching in the future and developed a web interface for programmeming control systems using the visual programmeming language "Blockly". The project was tested on a system for the hydraulic balancing of two vessels. It can be used in the future as a demonstrator, allowing, for example, first-semester students or school pupils without programmeming knowledge to independently develop simple control systems.
Prof. Penirschke expressed his satisfaction after the presentations: "Especially after the period of distance learning, this task helped students from different parts of the world to connect and work constructively together as a team on a topic from their area of study," he said. He added that the presentations were of a gratifyingly high quality.