Geographic Belts for Hurricane Landfall Location Prediction
When predicting a hurricane’s landfall location, small improvements in accuracy result in large savings of lives, property, and money. The project’s purpose was to apply a breakthrough method that can predict the geographic location of a hurricane’s landfall with high accuracy. Researchers have known for a long time that there are strong correlations between a hurricane’s landfall location and the geographic regions its track passes through. However, no methods have been developed to mathematically and explicitly describe these correlations. Consequently, the correlations can only serve to meteorologists as vague guidelines for their guestimates and are not usable in making practical forecasts. By studying the correlations and performing numerical optimization on historical hurricane data, this research discovered a set of geographic belt regions in the Gulf of Mexico that can be used as landfall location predictors. When a hurricane passes through any one of these belt lines, a prediction can be made by extending the hurricane’s moving direction vector towards land – the intersection point of this extension line with the coastline is the predicted landfall location. This prediction method is simple and straightforward. It only uses basic measurements from meteorological satellites: the hurricane’s real-time locations and moving directions. In conclusion, when compared to existing methods, the predictive belt method (PBM) created in this research provides a landfall location forecast with higher accuracy. Verification with historical hurricane data demonstrated that the PBM’s average error is less than 50% of the National Hurricane Center models’ error.
Androcopter, using smartphones as flightcontrollers for Quadrocopters
This project proposes that smartphones are capable of steering a quadcopter, doubling as a flight controller unit. This means that sensor results from the smartphone’s IMU (inertial measurement unit) are compared with steering commands from the pilot received over Wi-Fi or a RC-transmitter. The idea behind this project was to build a cheap flight control for a quadcopter. Smartphones seemed to be the perfect device because of their dominance in the market. The first step was constructing the quadcopter’s frame. I first designed the frame on AutoCAD and then built a prototype out of aluminium. My search for a possibility to connect the engines or low level peripherals to a smartphone led to the «IOIO-Board». After collecting sufficient information about sensor fusion and control theory I started working on my own controller. Due to the frame’s large size the quadcopter is very stable and best suited for aerial photography. Engine control by smartphone using an «IOIO-Board» is fast enough for flight. A smartphone possesses everything needed to control a quadcopter. The disadvantage of using a smartphone is that the processor has to calculate multiple applications simultaneously. This makes it more difficult to guarantee the correct timing of operations. Nevertheless, external influences such as phone calls do not influence the flight behavior of the quadcopter. As work in progress I have experimented with the implementation of GPS and an onboard camera.