Quanser Remote Book-Signing Event at ACC 2008, Seattle

At the 2008 American Control Conference (ACC), Dr. Michael Grimble, author and renowned professor from University of Strathclyde, UK, demonstrated a rotary control that mimics complex hand movements - a truly novel way of autographing books that Margaret Awood invented.

As ACC delegates looked on, the LongPen robotic arm etched Dr. Grimble's autograph on a copy of his latest book (pictured here).


Dr. Grimble some distance away at The Mathworks booth (our partner company), was signing a tablet PC (pictured here) - an interface through which real-time memory calls allow a person to enter their signature and have it remotely written by the system. The LongPen was designed using Quanser real-time control software which is seamlessly integrated with The Mathworks Simulink graphical design environment.

Thanks to Quanser's rapid control prototyping, hardware in-the-loop testing software (QuaRC), and some very smart engineers, when autograph-seeking controls enthusiasts are not too busy reading their favourite books, they can create pretty amazing robots with Quanser’s control hardware and software.

The attendees of ACC 2008 had a chance to win one of two remotely signed copies of Prof. Grimble's latest book. The lucky winners are:
- Mr. Hamid Teimoori from the University of New South Wales, Australia
and
- Dr. Jack W. Langelaan from The Pennsylvania State University
Congratulations!

Is it important to have engineering curriculum and teaching tools that are relevant to industry?

Do you think it is important to have engineering curriculum and teaching tools that are relevant to industry? We asked this question at the 2008 American Control Conference (ACC) in Seattle. Here are the answers from some of the professors. What do you think? Let us know!

Prof. Dennis Bernstein, University of Michigan
I hope that ultimately everything that we are teaching the students is relevant to the industry, at least in one way or the other. Certainly, the parts of curriculum that are obviously relevant to industry are very good in motivating students.
So, what I like to do is take an advantage of the years students spend at the university and teach them fundamentals... but I always do remind them and stress the relevance of what they are learning to the industry.

Prof. Andrew Alleyne, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
I think that engineers seem to have a type of mindset that is discovery-based or problem-motivated, I mean, they are going to learn the material much better if they can see why they are learning the material.
Usually a kid wants to be an engineer because they see a car, a spaceship, they see, you know, a wonderful new bio-material and, boy, it would be really cool to do that.
That's why it gets important if you go ahead and show them the kind s of thingd they would be using in the curriculum, so down the line, I think for most engineers, the vast majority of them - that's what is going to motivate them to really pay attention, really focus: I get to learn this because I will be using it here, I can see where I'm going to be applying this.

Prof. Michael J. Grimble, Strathclyde University, UK
Actually the curriculum needs rethinking. Many of the topics which are included are not so relevant. So students need exposure not only to relevant material, but also to relevant equipment they may come accross in the industry or at least the techniques that they are going to use in industry. And so, for both reasons, I think it is a good idea that we rethink how we run courses which are supposedly for industry, but probably are rather more academic than they should be.

Prof. Richard D. Braatz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Students have a tendency to compartmentalize information into the little boxes, no to see the interconnections. And one of the big place where we see a lot of compartmentalizing is between what they do on the paper and what they should do in practice.
I have an entire class that can do a great job at pencil and paper, but then you actually give them a real system and they need a tow. Because that aspect of engineering is learning by doing. If you don't get to do anything, you are not going to learn how to apply it in practice.

Prof. Stephen Kahne, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
First of all, most of our graduates will go to industry. Secondly, our students need motivation, and these tools can provide some motivation. Yes, and these hands-on experimental opportunities for kids to find out what control can do for them are very useful.
People don't really realize that a lot of what they are doing is empowered by and actually, there is control technology at work.

Prof. Chaouki D. Abdallah, New Mexico University
I do believe it's important to have engineering tools in teaching relevant to industry, I think it's more important however to have industry also be involved from the educational aspect, to undersatnd the educational measures.
It's much more important from our point of view as educators to educate students who can work in multiple industries rather than a particular one. So rather than training people in particular tool, what we would like to do, or what we strive to do is really to teach students how to use certain tools, but be able to go to multiple industries and multiple applications.

Want to Play a Virtual Brio Labyrinth Game?

Ask your students - as did Prof. Bo Wahlberg from School of Electrical Engineering of Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan (KTH), Sweden. As a part of Project Course in Automatic Control, students were asked to use force feedback to control virtual process - simulating a Brio Labyrinth game with use of two Quanser Engineering Trainers (QET) to control it. The main purpose of the project was to provide students with practical knowledge on modeling, design and analysis of control systems. it also taught them a team approach to problem solving, writing reports and presenting a solution. All of that can be achieved - and students enjoy it the process! Learn more about the project and post a comment! Do you think this is the way to help students learn?

Qanser's Leading-Edge UAV Research Project

One of today's hot research areas is the field of cooperative, unmanned autonomous vehicles. We in Quanser want to stay on the leading edge in research and are excited about applying our controls expertise to this opportunity.

The overarching goal of our research project is to permit the seamless integration of commercial-off-the-shelf unmanned vehicles into a fully autonomous, multiagent network. This integration is designed to permit multiagent mission planners to develop scenarios and vehicle objectives without the need for intensive programming or detailed vehicle specific knowledge. Users can treat all vehicles in the network in similar fashion and can focus on specific mission level differences such as different sensors and vehicle capabilities.

Ernest (in the middle) in the CTV studio on May 27, 2008, after giving an interview on Quanser leading-edge UAV research to a TV host Omar Sachedina (left), accompanied by Quanser Engineer, Rajibul Huq (right).

In addition to this work, which is being built to allow for mission designers to go from simulation to hardware as quickly and effortlessly as possible, we are focusing our attention on permitting true autonomous control of these systems. This level of development requires a team approach and we are focussing on accomplishing the research through a close collaboration with Precarn, Defense Research and Development Canada (DRDC), the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies and the U of T’s Joker Hill Ecological Preserve, for example.

Many open questions remain, such as truly representative demonstration mission types or appropriate autonomy levels in those missions. We are always looking for input on these and other aspects of the project, so drop us a line if you have some thoughts.

Quanser Unmanned Ground Vehicle Research Team (from left to right): Don Gardner, Andrew Dawes, Mahyar Fotoohi

In short, we are leveraging our and our partners’ work in developing cooperating fleets of fully autonomous vehicles to be used towards a variety of applications from search and rescue, resource surveying, even investigating climate change by monitoring leave-out patterns in forests. Our vision is to see an easy-use research and mission tool where the humans designing the applications serve more as coaches or managers rather than operators. You can only do this by taking the intelligence from the ground station, where it is currently usually found, and putting it on-board the vehicles where it can do the most good.

Dr. Ernest Earon, Senior R&D Engineer, Quanser

Qbot - Quanser mobile robot, represents another possible unmanned autonomous ground vehicle. Qbot is presented at ACC2008 Conference in Seattle and ASEE 2008 Conference in Pittsburgh. For details, contact sales@quanser.com

UAV flight tests

Latest flight tests of our new avionics HW &SW that allows user to upload Simulink controller to the in-flight UAV aerial hardware, switch instantaneously between the running controller and the newly uploaded one without interruptions and tune the new controller in-flight. Will be soon available for UAV research and educational labs to study various concepts (swarm theory, coordinated flying, phased arrays and many more), with applications in resource and security monitoring, search and rescue operations, military operations, automated traffic reporting etc.


Video shows coordinated mission, where red aircraft is waiting to be relieved by the blue one. The blue aircraft flies a pattern and communicates to the red aircraft to land. Both aircrafts are fully autonomous. Shown trajectory is actual flight path.

http://www.quanser.com/

Quanser sponsored 5th Annual Seismic Design Competition

It has become a tradition for Annual Meetings of Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) to host Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition - competition opened to all undergraduate civil engineering students. This year, the competition turned out to be one of the major highlights of the EERI Annual Meeting in New Orleans (Feb. 6-9, 2008). 17 competing teams built high-rise buildings that would be tested against an “earthquake” simulated by the Quanser Shake Table. The competition was exciting, educating and not to mention, a lot of fun! Quanser representative, Sunny Ray, had the opportunity to partake in the event as a celebrity judge. “It was fun and inspiring to be a part of this [event]. What impressed me the most was how enthusiastic the students were” says Sunny “and it was reassuring to witness that our company is making a real difference to the lives of engineering students by offering them a hands-on approach to understanding engineering theory.” Michel, one of the lead Quanser engineers at the conference, noticed that students come better prepared with more resilient building models year to year. Michel is on a personal mission to make the competition even more challenging next year – preparing to offer bi-directional (X-Y) motion and a wider, more vicious, variety of earthquake selections! So, teams, get ready for the challenge!

Hybrid Control of Inverted Pendulum with manual Wii swingup

This was done earlier today here at Quanser - our new rapid controls prototyping software QuaRC, has many new features - one of them being drag n' drop Simulink block support for the Nintendo Wii. Here we replaced the energy swing-up portion of the hybrid controller for a classic rotary inverted pendulum with manual control via the Wii.