Author: Erika  L.  Morin

Major: Mechanical Engineering

Graduation Year: 2016

Thesis Advisor: Michael Peterson

Description of Publication: The United States government has spent millions of dollars on border patrol and still does not have the best solution to control the border between the US and Canada. The area along the border is densely wooded and difficult to monitor by air due to tree cover, having manned vehicles is expensive and hazardous to field officers. The solution being proposed by the 2016 capstone class is an autonomous land based vehicle with audio and data acquisition to traverse the wilderness and monitor the border. An important part of the land based vehicle is its ability to collect and monitor acoustical data from the surroundings. The audio must be collected and then analyzed to determine whether there may be an imminent threat to the safety and control of the border. This report describes the beginning stages of a system to collect and analyze data from the border surroundings. The system collects and stores the data to an SD card that then has to be placed in a computer to be read and analyzed. The current system analyzes the audio files and provides frequency data for each file. The results have been consistently accurate and provide clear spectrums to analyze for further information. Future improvements should allow the system to process data in real time rather than having the delay between collection and analysis. The analysis should also allow for better noise filtering, narrowing in on frequencies that do signal a threat, versus those frequencies from wildlife and nature.

Location of Publication:

• fogler
• reynolds

URL to Thesis: