Reported by: ZHANG Jianxin, WU Gang
Translated by: LAI Xiaoyu
Edited by: Jennifer Taylor
Updated: 2013/6/3
May 19th, 60 college teams, who participated in the 2013 Second National Virtual Instruments Contest, presented their designs at Tianjin University. Many things shown in sci-fi films had become real.
The works were wide-ranging and creative. The Grand Prize is rewarded to a structured environment exploration robot, EBuilder, designed by students from HIT. It can be controlled manually or automatically. Furthermore, it can detect terrain navigation in an unknown environment, scale a real-time 2D map and draw 3D structured features.
There were many other fun and practical works. Students from the Beijing Information Science and Technology University design a mechanized vision seeing-eye system. They equipped a cane-shaped device with cameras and sensors. It can identify bus stops, traffic lights and the side roads for the blind automatically as well as provide a real-time vibration alert.
Junior students from the College of Precision Instrument and Opto-Electronic Engineering of Tianjin University designed a paper piano. Pianos normally play songs by physical collision. Instead, the students drew the keyboard on a card made of white paper and cloth. There was a camera above the card and when the fingers pressed the keyboard, the colors of corresponding area changed. The computer system makes sounds according to the data. The paper piano works like magic. The team leader, XING Xiukui explained this to the journalist.
The work made by Tsinghua University team turned “extracting with ideas” into a reality. The team leader explained that people had approached extracting with ideas by placing electrodes in the brain in the past. The students simplified the process of relating thoughts to eye movements. Helped by cameras, the robot calculated the person’s thought and separated controllers and other things.
The National Instruments Corporation proposed the concept of virtual instruments in the 1980s. Software is the core and modular hardware is the structure allowing flexible customization of the functions. The National Virtual Instruments Contest was first held last June. There were 1468 teams from 132 colleges and universities participating. Eventually, a total of 60 teams became the finalists.
