IEEE IHTC 2015 is calling for a student design competition on Project OS-ARIS.

Project OS-ARIS (Open Source Avalanche Rescue Imaging System) is an IEEE Ottawa  Section humanitarian technology initiative, in which its primary objective is to improve  and adapt an open-source, low-cost, radar imaging system for snow avalanche search  and rescue operations. The design is freely available from the MIT Open Course Ware  Program under the popular Creative Commons licensing. While scanning the debris,  this radar prototype will traverse a short distance across the disaster-stricken snow  terrain along a suspended zip-line held up between a pair of sturdy vertical masts.

Student design challenge/competition i.e. to design add-on modules for the MIT radar prototype:

1. A DAQ for triggering the radar and storing the data,
2. An IMU module for measuring and data logging the instantaneous physical position and orientation of the radar while it traverses along a suspended zip-line, or
3.  A very low-cost and efficient wideband Tx/Rx directive antenna pair to replace the Cantennas in the original radar prototype.

Judging criteria:

• Verified design, using theoretical calculations and/or software simulation (e.g. MATLAB, CAD TOOLS, etc.)
• Clarity of design ideas.
• Low cost and low power design using easily accessible (available) materials.
• Design to be adopted to as open source that is compatible with the Creative Commons license used by the MIT OCW design.
• Fabrication feasibility of the proposed hardware at the end of the competition.
• Ease of the integration into the MIT OCW design.

Interested groups are to submit an abstract to IHTC 2015.

Prototypes to be ready for demo by the time of the IHTC conference (May 31 – June 4, 2015)

Download Call for Student Competition :   IEEE IHTC 2015 STUDENT COMPETITION
Download Call for Student Design Competition : HIC IEEE STUDENT DESIGN COMPETITION

For more information, please feel free to contact:
Dr. Kin Sze (Project Leader, IEEE HIC-Ottawa SIGHT Affinity Group) at kinsze@ieee.org,
or Dr. Sawsan Abdul Majid (IEEE HIC students activities chair) at karimsawsan@yahoo.ca.

Resources for Student Design Competition

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Download Supporting Documents for the Design:

• Project Description Flyer
• IEEE Day 2014

Online Resources:

• Download entire MIT OCW radar imaging site as a single zip file
• Radar design “blueprint” (slides 7, 8, 10, 11, 12), material costs (slides 14 – 16), and instructions (slides 18 – 43).
• Block diagram
• Circuit schematic
• Antenna design lecture:  See slides 22 & 23
• SAR experiment presentation
• SAR imaging algorithm:  Matlab codes
• RF design lecture:  Design specifications (slides 3 -5), and component-level characterization (slides 38 – 53)

Course citation for the MIT OCW Radar Imaging System: 

Charvat, Gregory L., Jonathan H. Williams, Alan J. Fenn, Steve Kogon, and Jeffrey S. Herd. RES.LL-003 Build a Small Radar System Capable of Sensing Range, Doppler, and Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging,January IAP 2011. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare), http://ocw.mit.edu (Accessed 22 Jan, 2013). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA