So I have always known there are a lot of Steven Hansens in the world. I have started to talk a lot more just about my name in this blog to make sure it is clear that I am one of the top Steven Hansen’s on the internet.

Thanks to a recent search I found from whitepages, there are at least 688 Steven Hansens in the United States. And I imagine that is just the ones that have listed phone numbers. (click the image to enlarge)

Google currently reports 25,700 listings when you search for “Steven Hansen” with the quotations, meaning that only counts pages with Steven Hansen in that order and not pages that just happen to have Steven and Hansen on the same page.

There are 403 Steven Hansen users currently registered with LinkedIn. There are over 500 Steven Hansen users on Facebook. And intelius found 432 of us.

We are doing a chess program so I had to make another super long design document. Chess Design Document And here is an html link to one small part of our EcEN 490 senior project final report. All pretty boring documents that I posted here just to save them online somewhere.

Written by Steven Hansen about our ECEN 490 Senior Project BYU Robot Racer 2009

A fundamental piece of the project was actually controlling the steering angle and driving speed of the robot in order to successfully navigate the complicated pylon courses. After deciding early in the semester that we would drive directly towards the pylon we simply had to build an algorithm that could use the vision data to perform that principle action. First we created a few principle parameters that would be used throughout the control code. This including the parameters for driving straight speed, turning speed, number of encoder ticks to count per radian, and the distance before pylon to start turning. We were able to first successfully run the control code through the given simulator. Which allowed us to do some initial adjustments to our design and test our idea of driving directly towards the pylon.

We implemented this design with a simple state machine. During iterations through the main loop it would call the control state machine after analyzing a new frame of data from the camera. The state machine consisted of 6-7 states that the truck could be in at any given moment. The states included:
1. Pylon searching. During this state it was assumed that the pylon was in the given view. However it would only move out of this state when the vision software successfully recognized a pylon. If no pylon was currently recognized our final design simply had the truck continue straight at a slower speed while giving the vision algorithm more passes to analyze the data.
2. Pylon following. During this state the truck would make simple steering adjustments in order to maintain the pylon x-coordinate plus the width of a pylon in the center of the truck. Bigger distances from the center of the screen would mean larger adjustments of the steering angle during this state. The truck would continue in this state until the distance from the pylon was calculated to be less the threshold set in the global parameters as the distance before the pylon to turn.
3. Setting up the turn. There were two hard coded states that depended only on the parameters set for the truck. These two steps including turning slightly away from the pylon in the opposite direction then needed to be turned around the pylon and then driving straight a set distance in order to line up with the pylon nearly perpendicular from the line at which it was driving towards the pylon. If the vision consistently gave accurate values for the distance of the pylon these state worked perfectly every time. We assumed during this state that we would lose site of the pylon and we therefore did not use any of the vision calculations while in these states.
4. Dead-Reckoning turn around the pylon. Upon entering this state we simply saved the current Encoder value plus the number of ticks we needed to travel to complete the turn. This extra number of ticks was calculated by the angle given in the course description. When we approached a pylon of the same color as the previous pylon we added an extra 10 degrees to every turn due to the manner that we were entering the turns from an angle slightly less the perpendicular to the line straight from the previous pylon. When the truck approached a pylon of a different color then the previous pylon we added an extra 45 degrees to the turn in order to compensate for the fact that in this case the truck was crossing over the straight line between the two pylons and actually entered the turn much further back in the turn. The number of ticks per radian was set by a global parameter that we also could change through our gui. This variable of the ticks per radian needed to be adjusted when we tested new faster speeds navigating the course. When the calculated number of ticks had been completed the truck then moved back into the pylon searching state.

Full Chronological Review and other files

Here is a quick video of one of the more simpler pylon courses our truck was able to complete at the practice competition last week. The truck is only told the color of the next pylon, the truck then drives itself towards the closest pylon of that color, goes around it and then looks for the next pylon of the correct color. The on board camera and FPGA are doing all of the vision processing internally. Besides myself, Steven Hansen, there are 3 others on my project team: Brandon, Luke, and Jaren

It is not that Steven Hansen is a widely sought after keyword or anything. It is the simple fact that there are thousands of Steven Hansens all over the world. I can’t go to a doctor without having to give my exact address or phone number, since they have more then one person in their database with my same exact first and last name. So on the web when you search for my name you get a Steven Hansen that is an attorney, a Steven Hansen who was part of a movie, a Steven Hansen that is part of a band, and more recently, you get a Steven Hansen that is the Owner of the Spatical Company and actually refers to this website! Hooray! I have moved up in the rankings to a findable first page listing.

I guess it wasn’t very hard. Since the competition wasn’t really high, I simply needed to start optimizing for my name and bingo it is done. Now maybe if I ever do get famous, I’ll already own the top spots for my name.

I have added a new website to my list of my Steven Hansen personal online presence: Steven Hansen, Pro. I have added it as a sort of resume.  I hope to add any of my works online or offline to the site.  It has been sort of a debate of whether to publish those sorts of things under the company name or myself.  In the end I will probably do some of both.  Adding it to my personal site gives me a good spot to send possible employers, while adding it to the company site gives it a better flavor for potential clients.

As of today, Steven Hansen is a BYU undergrad in the Electrical Engineering program.  He is currently working on a fun project to design an automous race truck that can navigate around a swimming noodle pylon course.  He is planning to graduate in December of 2009 (this year!) with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and minor degrees in Spanish, Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science.

The main reason Steven Hansen has this blog is to give himself and other’s that might run accross this blog an archive of a few random things that would otherwise be hard to find.  It also has turned into a bit of an archive for school assignments and other little projects.  Once he is out of school this blog will probably turn into a record of my progress at work.

The only complaint Steven Hansen has with life are long lines or being required to park extraordinarily, excessively far from his classes at BYU.  It is hard to find anything else that is really in need of complaining about on a regular basis.

Here is a link to the Steven Hansen website.