The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Grove City College offers students opportunities to conduct meaningful, relevant research alongside experienced, published faculty. Students may conduct supervised research during their sophomore, junior, or senior years and have access to laboratories with state-of-the-art equipment and computer workstations. Students regularly present their work at on-campus venues such as the 5 Minute Thesis Competition, the regional Sigma Xi Undergraduate Research conference, and various international academic conferences (e.g., IEEE).
Time of flight (ToF) cameras are a recently introduced technology for generating 3D images for mapping, modeling, and navigation. ToF cameras are quickly gaining adoption in robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, and cell phones. However, commercially available ToF cameras can’t be used underwater since they rely on infrared light. Since 2019, over 20 students have worked with Dr. Rumbaugh to advance the state of the art in underwater imaging by modifying existing time of flight (ToF) cameras with green laser illuminators that allow for underwater use. Our ECE students have been involved in making key advances in circuit design, optics testing, image processing software, and field deployment. These students have run cameras in the lab, in pools, rivers, and lakes, resulting in student publications at international academic conferences. Our research students work closely with both military and academic collaborators, and they travel to US Navy sites, local waterways, and partner labs for testing and discussion on how to keep pushing this technology forward.
The impact on the ionospheric conditions from space weather (e.g., geomagnetic storms) is a difficult phenomenon to study as it requires datapoints from geographically separate locations. The Ham Science Citizen Investigation (HamSci) project developed by the University of Scranton and Case Western Reserve University seeks to enable this geographically dispersed data collection by providing the design of small radio receivers and a common database to aggregate the data. Grove City students built a GRAPE 1 receiver, configured the system to automatically send data to the HamSci network, and have been exploring the impacts of various space weather events.