Miniature underwater drone
Contents
Supervisors
Research Project Team Members
- 2023: Nazif Sobri and Alif Ayman and Yang Li, see Miniature underwater drone 2023
Project Guidelines
Project Description and Background
Underwater drones have become an essential tool for exploring and investigating the ocean environment (Mayer et al., 2012). These unmanned vehicles provide a safe, cost-effective, and efficient way for collecting data and performing tasks in deep and shallow water. The development of advanced sensors, imaging systems, and propulsion technologies has made it possible to design and build underwater drones that can operate in challenging conditions, opening up new opportunities for scientific research and commercial activities (Schulz et al., 2019).
Weekly Progress
Approach and methodology
You have an advantage that as engineers you know more about information theory and statistics than the average policeman or code breaking expert. You will take a structured approach to writing software code to use a process of elimination to say whether particular coding schemes were used or not.
Start with the Playfair cipher and the Vigenère cipher to begin with and you should find that you can easily test the above sequence of letters to prove the Vigenère cipher was definitely not used. Then you can go onto exploring other encryption schemes
- Note from Matthew: If you include the extra line, I'm not so sure you can prove it's not the Vigenère cipher. Also, given the date of the murder, and the dates of invention of some ciphers, there are some you could reasonably rule out (e.g. I doubt it's RSA for historical and technical reasons), however you can still implement them and try them out :). If you dig into some of the historical documents on the case you may find clues to possible decryption keys.
We would also like you to perform simple statistical tests to show if English was the most likely language or not in the original message. Also you should be able to prove if the code is the beginning letter of a sequence of words or is composed of whole words. A list of letter frequency rankings for different languages can be found here.
Then if you have time and if you are excited to take this project to a higher level you can start to check out the work of the great electrical engineer Claude Shannon and apply his techniques from information theory. You can measure the information content in the message in terms of bits for starters.
Possible extension
If you knock off this project too easily and are looking for a harder code cracking problem to try your software out on, you can progress to analyzing another famous unsolved mystery: the Voynich Manuscript
Expectations
- We don't really expect you to find the killer, though that would be cool if you do and you'll become very famous overnight.
- To get good marks we expect you to show a logical approach to decisively eliminating which coding schemes were definitely not used.
- In your conclusion, you need to come up with a short list of likely possibilities and a list of things you can definitely eliminate that the code is not.
- We expect you to critically look at the conclusions of the previous project groups and highlight to what extent your conclusions agree and where you disagree.
- We expect all the written work to be place on this wiki. No paper reports are to be handed up. Just hand up a CD with your complete project directory at the end. One CD for each group member.
- It is expected that you fill out a short progress report on the wiki each week, every Friday evening, to briefly state what you did that week and what the goals are for the following week.
- It is important to regularly see your main supervisors. Don't let more than 2 week go by without them seeing your face briefly.
- You should be making at least one formal progress meeting with supervisors per month. It does not strictly have to be exactly a month, but roughly each month you should be in a position to show some progress and have some problems and difficulties to discuss.
- The onus is on you to drive the meetings, make the appointments and set them up.
- You are expected to make a YouTube presentation of your whole project.
References and useful resources
If you find any useful external links, list them here:
