Experiences with mechatronics education at the University of Twente

This paper describes the experiences with a number of variants of mechatronic programmes offered by the University of Twente since 1989. Mechatronics education took place in a two-year mechatronic designer programme, in specialisations in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering and in an international MSc programme. In the new European BSc/MSc structure the University of Twente will offer an MSc mechatronics where the course language will be English. There have been large mechatronic projects, where 4 PhD and some 50 MSc students did their thesis work as well as two-week mechatronic projects in the BSc curricula of EE and ME. The latter show that mechatronics is not only a topic of interest for students who want to specialise in this direction, but that mechatronic projects also offer a challenge for electrical and mechanical engineering students in general

A MRAS-based Learning Feed-forward Controller

Inspired by learning feed–forward control structures, this paper considers the adaptation of the parameters of a model–reference based learning feed–forward controller that realizes an inverse model of the process. The actual process response is determined by a setpoint generator. For linear systems it can be proved that the controlled system is asymptotically stable in the sense of Liapunov. Compared with more standard model reference configurations this system has a superior performance. It is fast, robust and relatively insensitive for noisy measurements. Simulations with an arbitrary second–order process and with a model of a typical fourth–ordermechatronics process demonstrate this

Mechatronic Design: A Port-Based Approach

In this paper we consider the integrated design of a mechatronic system. After considering the different design steps it is shown that a port-based approach during all phases of the design supports a true mechatronic design philosophy. Port-based design enables use of consistent models of the system throughout the design process, multiple views in different domains and reusability of plant models, controller components and software processes. The ideas are illustrated with the conceptual and detailed design of a mobile robot

Mechatronics at the University of Twente

This paper describes some of the mechatronics activities at the University of Twente. In 1989, the founding of the Mechatronics Research Center Twente started a cooperation of the departments of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. The mechatronics activities get especially attention in projects in the Ph.D. programme and in the `mechatronic designer' program, but Msc. students participate as well. As an illustration of the philosophy behind the work at the University of Twente and of the activities carried out so far, the paper describes two projects of the institute: the MART (Mobile Autonomous Robot Twente) project and the ALASCA (Automated Laser Aided Servo Controlled Assembly) projec

Classifying motor imagery in presence of speech

In the near future, brain-computer interface (BCI) applications for non-disabled users will require multimodal interaction and tolerance to dynamic environment. However, this conflicts with the highly sensitive recording techniques used for BCIs, such as electroencephalography (EEG). Advanced machine learning and signal processing techniques are required to decorrelate desired brain signals from the rest. This paper proposes a signal processing pipeline and two classification methods suitable for multiclass EEG analysis. The methods were tested in an experiment on separating left/right hand imagery in presence/absence of speech. The analyses showed that the presence of speech during motor imagery did not affect the classification accuracy significantly and regardless of the presence of speech, the proposed methods were able to separate left and right hand imagery with an accuracy of 60%. The best overall accuracy achieved for the 5-class separation of all the tasks was 47% and both proposed methods performed equally well. In addition, the analysis of event-related spectral power changes revealed characteristics related to motor imagery and speech

Mixed reality participants in smart meeting rooms and smart home enviroments

Human–computer interaction requires modeling of the user. A user profile typically contains preferences, interests, characteristics, and interaction behavior. However, in its multimodal interaction with a smart environment the user displays characteristics that show how the user, not necessarily consciously, verbally and nonverbally provides the smart environment with useful input and feedback. Especially in ambient intelligence environments we encounter situations where the environment supports interaction between the environment, smart objects (e.g., mobile robots, smart furniture) and human participants in the environment. Therefore it is useful for the profile to contain a physical representation of the user obtained by multi-modal capturing techniques. We discuss the modeling and simulation of interacting participants in a virtual meeting room, we discuss how remote meeting participants can take part in meeting activities and they have some observations on translating research results to smart home environments