This is supplemental information to our official website. Here, we provide information early, or a bit more information that may be of interest. We are not ready with the spring projects yet. We are expecting one more within the domain of Product design.

Prj. 1: Design a proof-of-concept for an electronic surfboard with a lifting-foil

Design a proof-of-concept for an electronic surfboard with a lifting-foil — e-foil surfing. 

These systems have propulsion and a lifting-foil (or foils) below the surface, and a board with batteries and controllers above water. When in use, the lifting-foil will ensure that the board is lifted free of the water. 

Commercial systems that can be used for surfing exists. Your challenge is to create a proof-of-concept for an e-foil surfer that can be built with commercially available components. Another group has already created a very simple proof-of-concept. We need an ambitious and hard-working group to take it further.

Supervisor: prof. Vahid Hassani

Prj. 2: Design and Construction of a Wind Tunnel Force Balance

OsloMet has acquired an open-circuit low-speed wind tunnel for which we seek a force balance for educational projects. The objective of this project is to design and build a force balance system for a wind tunnel that measures at least the time-averaged lift and drag forces on various aerodynamic and bluff bodies. If possible also the pitching moments could be included. The motivation is to design and built a low-cost force balance with a user-friendly interface for calibration and display of the measured values.

Skills wanted within the group: Mechanical and electronic knowledge. Some programming/ scripting knowledge. Knowledge about design will be useful.

Supervisor: prof. Ramis Örlü

Prj. 3: Virtual Horticultural Health Companion

Self-contained, compact system for growing plants on a small scale in a small apartment setting with LLM and therapeutic light system integration.

The system must fit on top of a chest of drawers or similar. It should include automated grow light and watering system and a timed therapy light to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). In addition, there should be a speech based LLM to function as personal companion. This LLM should be given a «personality» related to the system.

The supervisor can provide further details, and suggests that competencies from industrial design, computer science, and electrical and mechanical engineering will prove useful. Keywords: CAD, 3Dprinting, Physical prototyping, local LLM, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, User testing, Mental Health, Isolation/loneliness, Horticulture, Therapy light, Image analysis, System integration, Hydroponics

Supervisor: eng. Mikael Omlid

Prj. 4: Resurrect Pepper the robot

Your goal is to create a artificial host for the IT department able to receive guests, answer questions and give a guided tour of the main activities in the institute, especially the AI Lab.

To that end you will use a robotic platform called Pepper, a remnant of early, user-friendly, humanoid robots. But here is the challenge: our Pepper robot may be beyond all hope! 

Your task is to make one last attempt to resurrect Pepper! Or decide that it’s time has come. In that case we can use a cluster of Raspberry pi’s to  create a virtual host leveraging the most advanced tech in Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models and Agentic AI, you will tell us! (Something related is done Fall 2024, see end of page.)

Supervisor: ass. prof. Gustavo Borges Moreno e Mello