Development of Product Engineering Skills with PLM Applications Through Collaborative Educational Projects

Part 5: Education in the Field of Industry 4.0International audienceIn the industrial discipline of product design and manufacturing, training and learning methods for last academic course engineering students is difficult and complex since they have to integrate technical knowledge with computer-aided applications (CAx) and new skills in collaborative work. With the trends of Industry 4.0, companies request new talents and improved competences from the very first time. The fact that Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platforms with a huge variety of tools support structured collaborative practices drives us to use them as a gear to integrate all the engineering and put it into practice for engineering content creation. In this contribution we present an innovative academic project for the last academic course students integrating several subjects in order to develop an industrial project working in a PLM platform. The platform allows us to control not only the data but also the scheduled activities of a project while the participants use different engineering applications in each phase of the project. Traditionally, engineering education deals with the learning of CAD, CAE and CAM tools separately, giving a partial learning experience and vision to the students. This communication presents a structured integrated vision of this learning project and the achieved results

Humans Construct Survey Estimates on the Fly from a Compartmentalised Representation of the Navigated Environment

Despite its relevance for navigation surprisingly little is known about how goal direction bearings to distant locations are computed. Behavioural and neuroscientific models proposing the path integration of previously navigated routes are supported indirectly by neural data, but behavioral evidence is lacking. We show that humans integrate navigated routes post-hoc and incrementally while conducting goal direction estimates. Participants learned a multi-corridor layout by walking through a virtual environment. Throughout learning, participants repeatedly performed pairwise pointing from the start location, end location, and each turn location between segments. Pointing latency increased with the number of corridors to the target and decreased with pointing experience rather than environmental familiarity. Bimodal pointing distributions indicate that participants made systematic errors, for example, mixing up turns or forgetting segments. Modeling these error sources suggests that pointing did not rely on one unified, but rather multiple representations of the experimental environment. We conclude that participants performed incremental on-the-fly calculations of goal direction estimates within compartmentalised representations, which was quicker for nearby goals and became faster with repeated pointing. Within navigated environments humans do not compute difference vectors from coordinates of a globally consistent integrated “map in the head”

The cognitive map in humans: spatial navigation and beyond

The ‘cognitive map’ hypothesis proposes that brain builds a unified representation of the spatial environment to support memory and guide future action. Forty years of electrophysiological research in rodents suggests that cognitive maps are neurally instantiated by place, grid, border, and head direction cells in the hippocampal formation and related structures. Here we review recent work that suggests a similar functional organization in the human brain and reveals novel insights into how cognitive maps are used during spatial navigation. Specifically, these studies indicate that: (i) the human hippocampus and entorhinal cortex support map-like spatial codes; (ii) posterior brain regions such as parahippocampal and retrosplenial cortices provide critical inputs that allow cognitive maps to be anchored to fixed environmental landmarks; (iii) hippocampal and entorhinal spatial codes are used in conjunction with frontal lobe mechanisms to plan routes during navigation. We also discuss how these three basic elements of cognitive map based navigation—spatial coding, landmark anchoring, and route planning—might be applied to non-spatial domains to provide the building blocks for many core elements of human thought