A team of four engineering students won awards at the Princeton Hack-a-thon on April 1-2.
A team of four engineering students won awards at the Princeton Hack-a-thon on April 1-2. Their project, Olli Recalli, won “Best DIY Project” and “Best Use of Watson IoT – sponsored by IBM.” They combined the capabilities of self-driving shuttle bus Olli and IBM’s Watson to develop a system that alerts passengers of items inadvertently left behind. When the bus stops, a light-sensitive resistor on the seat checks to see whether the passenger has left and then uses a camera to take a picture of the luggage storage area underneath the seat. The picture is sent to Watson, which checks to see if the space is empty or if an object is there. If Watson finds something, it identifies the type and color of the object and alerts passengers as to what was left behind. The team of Mark Seda, Jonathan Wood, Liz Strobel and Aric Lu now plans to scale up their solution to work with multiple devices and then collaborate with IBM and Olli to implement the technology.