Application of LEGO Mindstorms Kits for Teaching Mechatronics Engineering

One of the major educators’ challenges is to teach the theoretical lessons with practical examples that can be taught in the classroom or teaching laboratories. The application of these examples will face a major problem for students in engineering: the difficulty of understanding and seeing how a mechatronic device works in everyday life. This requires the use of tools that enable the construction of different low cost prototypes to assist in student learning. Another challenge to educators is the need to motivate students during the lessons and to present models that students can make and develop on their own. Within this context this paper presents a pedagogic proposition based on the use of LEGO Mindstorms kits to teach practical lab activities in a mechatronics engineering course. The objective is to develop teaching methodologies with the use of these LEGO kits in order to motivate the students and also to promote a higher interdisciplinarity, by proposing projects that unify different disciplines. Thus, the paper is divided into three parts according to the educational experiences implemented in the course of mechatronics engineering at the Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil. The first part presents the use of the kits in robotics discipline. The second part presents the use of the virtual kits in the Computer Aided Design discipline with zero-cost. The third part presents a multi-disciplinary project EDROM in mechatronics using LEGO kits

Materials Handling in Production Systems: Design and Performance of Kit Preparation

This thesis focuses on processes for kit preparation, which are applied with the materials supply principle of kitting in production systems for mixed-model assembly. With kitting, assembly processes are supplied with portions of pre-sorted components, and each portion makes up a kit that holds the components needed for one assembly object at one or several assembly processes. When kitting is applied, picking activities, which are otherwise performed at assembly processes, are instead carried out in a process for kit preparation. Kit preparation involves collecting components designated for a particular assembly object into a single unit load that is delivered to assembly.Kitting is widely seen as beneficial for quality and flexibility in assembly processes when there are a large variety of components. Performance effects in assembly processes normally associated with kitting largely depend on the performance of kit preparation. Previous research indicates that a picking system’s design greatly impacts its performance. While research that has dealt with kit preparation points out several design aspects that can affect its performance, the available knowledge is far from exhaustive. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledge of how kit preparation design aspects govern kit preparation performance.Case research, experiments, and modelling have been used to study how flexibility, kit quality and man-hour efficiency are affected by kit preparation design aspects related to work organisation, layout, policies, packaging, equipment, picking information, automation and control. Two case research studies respectively address kit preparation flexibility and kit quality, identifying how kit preparation design aspects can be configured to support these two performance areas. Two experiments focus on how picking information systems and confirmation methods affect kit preparation man-hour efficiency. One modelling study focuses on how collaborative robots can support man-hour efficient kit preparation. Through involvement in three research projects and an extensive review of the literature, this research has been guided by the needs of industry and by previously established knowledge.This thesis contributes to theory and to practice in the form of knowledge about relationships between kit preparation design aspects and the performance areas flexibility, kit quality and manhour efficiency. The theoretical contribution consists of building upon and underpinning the limitedknowledge about the topic that has been previously available, while also adding new knowledge. This includes, for example, glasses with integrated computer displays, RFID-scanning wristbands, and collaborative robots, and how they are linked to kit preparation performance. The practical contribution consists of concise yet holistic descriptions of relationships between kit preparation design and performance, which industry can readily adopt with some consideration to the situation’s characteristics

Open source and free software in film and media production

The Open Source and Free philosophy encourages an environment of freely sharing ideas, tools and content. Because of this, a user can freely share, customize and build upon existing solutions. Using this philosophy of sharing tools, ideas and content in a film and media production environment, has been an interest of mine for a while now. I am interested in exploring an alternative to the industry standards in the field today and can smaller budget films and freelancers benefit from this? Software can be put into two different categories, proprietary software and Open Source or Free (as in free speech not free stuff) software. Proprietary software refers to software that is closed source. This means that the software is exclusive property of its developers or publishers and cannot be copied or distributed without complying with their licensing agreements. Almost all commercial software is proprietary. Free and Open Source software are open to modification and redistribution. Because of the open development model of Open Source and Free software, I ask the question: “Can Open Source and Free software be used for professional film production, media production and education?” The research for this thesis is a combination of practical and qualitative research. First, I study and analyse the philosophy of Open Source and Free Software, with a focus on the implementation of it to film and media production. Secondly, I include real world examples of implementing this software to professional film and media production. Thirdly, I contemplate the ethical questions and possible issues of using non-copyrighted tools to create copyrighted material. Finally, I have included two of my own projects that use Open Source and Free software. These are the Open Creative Suite and the Portable virtual studio system. The Open Creative Suite is my attempt to compile and unify a group of programs that can be used in a pre-production environment. To make the installation and use of them easier to my peers and colleagues. With the Portable virtual studio I attempt to build a portable system to film live footage with a virtual environment. This project is made to test the Open Source and Free software style of development. The research brought up some interesting points. First, Open Source and Free software has finally reached the quality it needs to be used in professional production. Secondly, it explores the ethical dialogue of the responsibility we as creators have of making our techniques and tools accessible to others. Finland is a small country and to efficiently use the resources we have, Open Source and Free software provides a partial solution. By the help of this research I hope to shed some light on this subject and demonstrate to others an alternative way of doing creative work.Avoimien ja Vapaiden ohjelmistojen filosofia kannustaa ideoiden, työkalujen ja sisällön vapaaseen jakamiseen. Tämän takia ohjelmistojen käyttäjät voivat vapaasti jakaa, muuttaa ja rakentaa olemassa olevien ratkaisujen pälle. Tämän jakamisen filosofian käyttäminen elokuva ja media tuotannon yhteydessä, on ollut kiinnostuksen kohde minulle jo jonkin aikaa. Olen myös kinnostunut tutkimaan vaihtoehtoa elokuva ja mediateollisuuden käyttämiin nykyisiin ratkaisuihin. Voivatko esimerkiksi pienen budjetin elokuvat ja freelancerit hyötyä tästä? Ohjelmistot voidaan jakaa kahteen eri kategoriaan, suljettuihin ja avoimiin tai vapaisiin. Suljetut ohjemistot viittaavat ohjelmistoihin jotka eivät jaa lähdekoodia. Tämä tarkoittaa että ohjelmisto on yksinomaan sen kehittäjien omaisuutta ja sitä ei saa kopioida, jakaa tai käyttää suostumatta heidän lisenssiin. Melkein kaikki kaupallinen ohjelmisto on suljettua. Avoimien ja Vapaiden ohjelmien vapaamman kehitysmallin takia, esitän kysymyksen: "Soveltuvatko Avoimet ja Vapaat ohjelmat Elokuvan ja median ammatilliseen tuotantoon?" Tutkimus rakentuu käytännön ja laadullisen tutkimuksen yhdistelmästä. Ensiksi, tutkin ja analysoin Avoimien ja Vapaiden ohjelmistojen filosofiaa, pääteemana miten se soveltuu elokuvan ja median tuotantoympäristöön. Toiseksi, käyn läpi esimerkkejä ammattimaailman ratkaisuista käyttää tämän kaltaisia ohjelmistoja. Kolmanneksi, pohdin eettisiä kysymyksiä ja mahdollisia ongelmia tekijänoikeusvapaan työkalun käytöstä luomaan tekijänoikeutettua materiaalia. Lopuksi, esittelen kaksi omaa projektiani jotka käyttävät Avoimia ja Vapaita ohjelmia. Nämä ovat Avoin Luova Ohjelmistokokoelma (Open Creative Suite) ja Kannettava virtuaalistudio (Portable virtual studio system). Avoin Luova Ohjelmistokokoelma on yritykseni koota ja yhdistää ryhmä ohjelmia jota voidaan käyttää tuotannon ennakkosuunnitteluun. Ajatus tässä on tehdä näiden ohjelmien asennus ja käyttöönotto helpommaksi kolleegoilleni. Kannettava virtuaalistudio on yritykseni rakentaa kannettava järjestelmä jolla voidaan kuvata reaaliaikaista kuvaa virtuaalisessa ympäristössä. Projektin toteutin kokeena, kokeillakseni avoimien ja vapaiden ohjelmistojen kehitysmallia. Tutkimus tuo esille pari kiinnostavaa huomiota. Ensiksi, Vapaat ja Avoimet ohjelmistot ovat viimeinkin saavuttaneet laadut ne vaativat, jotta niitä voi käyttää elokuvien ja median ammattituotannossa. Toiseksi, se tuo esille eettisen dialogin meidän vastuusta tekijöinä, tehdä tekniikoistamme ja työkaluistamme saatavia muille. Suomi on pieni maa ja pienet resurssit pitää käyttää tehokkaasti, avoimet ja vapaat ohjelmistot tarjoavat osaratkaisun tälle. Tällä tutkimuksella haluan valaista tätä aihetta ja esitellä kolleegoilleni vaihtoehtoisen tavan tehdä luovaa työtä

Biology Laboratories at a Distance: A Case Study and Experiment of Ecology and Evolution Labs with Community College Students

Community colleges deliver more courses online; laboratory-based courses face challenges in how to do this. This study examined how ecology and evolution laboratories could effectively be delivered in an online biology community college course. Virtual simulations and hands-on, at-home kits were used in two groups. Results showed that students using the virtual simulations had higher learning gains and more positive perceptions towards their laboratory experiences than those students using athome kits. By evaluating learning gains on a pretest/posttest and utilizing interviews and focus groups, this research concluded that virtual simulations offered a superior learning experience for online learners. The results suggest that laboratory experiences offered students important advantages: course engagement, opportunities to think about the processes of science, and opportunities to engage with difficult or abstract content. Students expected laboratories to be streamlined. The results of this research suggest that instructors and administrators at community colleges critically examine the use of virtual simulations for abstract or difficult content as virtual simulations provided opportunities for greater student success than traditional, hands-on labs when delivered online. Virtual simulations provide viable alternatives to traditional laboratories for online students

Human-Robot Collaboration in Automotive Industry

Human–Robot Collaboration is a new trend in the field of industrial and service. Application of human-robot-collaboration techniques in automotive industries has many advantages on productivity, production quality and workers’ ergonomic; however, workers’ safety aspects play the vital role during this collaboration. Previously, the machine is allowed to be at automatic work only if operators are out of its workspace but today collaborative robots provide the opportunity to establish the human robot cooperation. In this thesis, efforts have been made to present innovative solutions for using human-robot collaboration to develop a manufacturing cell. These solutions are not only used to facilitate the operator working with collaborative robots but also consider the worker safety and ergonomic. After proposing different solutions for improving the safety of operations during the collaboration with industrial robots, the efficiency of the solutions is tested in both laboratory and virtual environments. In this research, firstly, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been used as a potential decision maker to prove the efficiency of human-robot collaboration system over the manual one. In the second step, detailed task decomposition has been done using Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) to allocate operational tasks to human and robot reducing the chance of duty interference. In the International Organization of Standardization's technical specification 15066 on collaborative robot safety four methodologies have been proposed to reduce the risk of injury in the work area. The four methods implied in ISO/TS 15066 are safety-rated monitored stop (SMS), hand-guided (HG), speed and separation monitoring (SSM) and power force limiting (PFL). SMS method reduces the risk of operator’s injury by stopping the robot motion whenever the operator is in the collaborative workspace. HG method reduces the chance of operator’s injury by providing the possibility of having control over the robot motion at all times in the workstation using emergency system or enabling device. The SSM method determines the minimum protective distance between a robot and an operator in the collaborative workspace, below which the robot will stop any kind of motion and PFL method reduces the momentum of a robot in a way that contact between an operator and the robot will not cause any injury. After determining the requirements and specifications of hybrid assembly cell, few of the above-mentioned methods for evaluating the safety of human-robot-collaboration procedure have been tasted in the laboratory environment. Due to the lack of safety camera (sensors) in the laboratory workstation, the ISO methods such as SSM, that needs sensors in the workstation, have been modeled in virtual environment to evaluate different scenario of human-robot-interaction and feasibility of the assembly process. Implementing different scenarios of ISO methods in hybrid assembly workstation not only improves the operator safety who is in interaction with the collaborative robot but also improves the worker ergonomic during the performing of repetitive heavy tasks

SCRA annual report 2020

The South Carolina Research Authority annually submits a report with information on agency projects, financial statements, programs, and list of board members

Perception-driven optimal motion planning under resource constraints

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Ocean Science & Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution February 2019.Over the past few years there has been a new wave of interest in fully autonomous robots operating in the real world, with applications from autonomous driving to search and rescue. These robots are expected to operate at high speeds in unknown, unstructured environments using only onboard sensing and computation, presenting significant challenges for high performance autonomous navigation. To enable research in these challenging scenarios, the first part of this thesis focuses on the development of a custom high-performance research UAV capable of high speed autonomous flight using only vision and inertial sensors. This research platform was used to develop stateof-the-art onboard visual inertial state estimation at high speeds in challenging scenarios such as flying through window gaps. While this platform is capable of high performance state estimation and control, its capabilities in unknown environments are severely limited by the computational costs of running traditional vision-based mapping and motion planning algorithms on an embedded platform. Motivated by these challenges, the second part of this thesis presents an algorithmic approach to the problem of motion planning in an unknown environment when the computational costs of mapping all available sensor data is prohibitively high. The algorithm is built around a tree of dynamically feasible and free space optimal trajectories to the goal state in configuration space. As the algorithm progresses it iteratively switches between processing new sensor data and locally updating the search tree. We show that the algorithm produces globally optimal motion plans, matching the optimal solution for the case with the full (unprocessed) sensor data, while only processing a subset of the data. The mapping and motion planning algorithm is demonstrated on a number of test systems, with a particular focus on a six-dimensional thrust limited model of a quadrotor