A “Modal” course (= experimental project in electronics) is aimed primarily at turning the traditional pedagogical approach round, starting from experimental phenomena and ending up with the theory.
In order to allow the largest possible number of students to follow such courses, two series of modal are programmed in the periods from January to April (P3) and from April to June (P4) respectively.
The Experimental Electronics Centre of the Physics Department organizes an experimental teaching module MODAL on ELECTRONICS.
The aim of this course is to get the pupils to discover the scientific domains underpinning a high-tech device, favouring a project-oriented and engineering-based approached based on laboratory work that offers plenty of room for creativity. This will therefore allow the physics and mathematics that underly these high-tech objects – a DVD, a CCD camera, a GSM phone, a GPS receiver, or an autonomous robot – to be tackled experimentally.
More precisely, the following will be covered :
- starting from an engineering problem that has to be resolved (data transmission, acoustic reproduction, handling speech or images, determining position using satellites or additional behaviour of a robot) while defining a target and a list of specifications
- to clarify the scientific concepts and practical tools utilized in this field, and to learn about them by applying them within the project
- to reflect on the problem posed and find reasoned solutions for it (by yourself, in the literature or with the help of the teaching staff)
- to determine the feasibility of these solutions, to model them and to implement an actual telecommunications, electronics, signal processing or robotics system in the laboratory and to evaluate the results obtained
In the course of this work, you will uncover the most fundamental questions of signal processing, automation and robotics, backed up by materials provided to you that have been adapted to this approach. The guideline around which the proposed course will be organized is the rollout of the project in the laboratory.
The projects proposed cover several aspects of signal processing, electronics and robotics :
- Digital telecommunications: simultaneous transmission of voice and data, numeric coding, modulation and radio transmission, error correction and security of the links, integration within a communications network.
- Digital handling of sound and speech: the chain of acquisition, processing and reconstitution. Effects of sampling, quantification and data compression. Voice recognition and real-time processing using DSP.
- Digital image processing: CCD camera, filtering and restoration of damaged images, recognition of shapes and stereoscopic vision, compression of fixed and moving images (JPEG and MPEG).
- GPS satellite-based positioning system: implementation, advance processing and improving the accuracy, studying the sources of error.
- Autonomous mobile robot carrying out a defined task while moving around the laboratory, or manipulator arm associated with a visual system for recognizing and sorting objects. Perception of the surroundings using a variety of sensors (infrared, ultrasonic, magnetic, optical) and working out a behavioural strategy.
- Drone: understand and implement in real-time the feedback control, positioning and visualization tools to automatic flight control of a Drone (AR Parot)
- Programmable logic circuits (FPGA): using a complete CAD chain of complex preset programmable logic circuits (FPGA = Field Programmable Gate Array), designing an application, real-time, linked to signal processing: spectrum analyser, audio equaliser.
Last Modification : Thursday 22 March 2012
|
