A team of Rossin College electrical and computer engineering PhD students, advised by ECE professor Yahong Rosa Zheng, placed third in the "Networked Computing on the Edge" student design competition held during the 2021 CPS-IoT Week virtual conference (May 18-21).
A total of 10 teams, representing 15 institutions, competed in the event, submitting a poster and delivering an oral presentation. Participants were encouraged to submit innovative projects involving “integrated computing, control, and communication components on the ground, underwater or air mobile platforms” on topics such as “unmanned aerial vehicle networks, urban aerial mobility, autonomous driving, edge computing, and human-machine interfaces,” according to the competition’s website.
The entry from Lehigh doctoral students Xiyuan Zhu ’20G (pictured, left) and Andrew Charway ‘19G (pictured, right), “Video Transmission through Underwater Acoustic Channels,” sought to overcome bandwidth and environmental hurdles that make achieving transmission rates suitable for underwater wireless video transmission prohibitive.
The team developed a custom circuit board to use in conjunction with the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) to achieve Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) high-order modulation for video transmission. Zhu and Charway designed a transmission system and conducted field experiments.
Advancing research in this area will “enable a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to communicate effectively with each other via wireless communications,” according to the team.
Read more about the event and view the full list of winners on the competition’s website.