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.

Customer testimony - Dr. Yongpeng Zhang, Prairie View A&m University, Texas

“Quanser simplified our researchers’ work, and our own programming can be conveniently built on the samples provided. We can now concentrate on the control theory and its algorithm development.”

Dr. Yongpeng Zhang, Assistant Professor, Prairie View A&M University, Texas

2DOF Table

A new module for the Quanser's Rotary Family (SRV02) is coming out soon. It is our first experiment that uses vision system (integrating with Point Grey cameras) to control the movement of the table.

1. Table moves ball in a circular path

2. Table "catches" the ball and centers it