MechGen FG is on the iPhone
MechGen on iPhone
MechGen FG is now on the iPhone, thanks to the excellent work by Jeff Glabe and Kaustubh Sonawale.
UCI’s 2015 Race Team
UCI’s 2015 race team at the Winter Design Review. On the left is Zeta an all-electric Formula SAE racecar that will compete at the UCI Energy Invitational, and on the right is Savage which is a combustion engine driven FSAE racecar that will compete at FSAE Lincoln in Nebraska
2015 UCI Energy Invitational
2015 Energy Invitational
The 2015 UCI Energy Invitational is scheduled for May 24, 2015 on UCI’s campus. Please have your raceteam contact Tanya Eberhard at tanya.e@uci.edu. We look forward to you joining us.
Four-bar function generator: Open a door
Four-bar function generator
Select this link, Four-bar linkages, for a Geogebra book that illustrates linkages ranging from a lever to a crank-rocker that open a door. This includes the construction of a four-bar linkage that coordinates the open and closed positions with specific input crank angles, called a four-bar function generator. The iPad application, MechGen FG, computes four-bar function generators for five coordinated values of the input and output cranks.
Long-travel six-bar vehicle suspension
Mark Plecnik has applied his research on the design of six-bar linkage function generators to the challenge of a long travel independent suspension for an off-road vehicle. UCI race car engineering students built a 1/5 scale model of his latest design and compared its performance to his calculated design. For more detail see his video:
Rescue Robotics: Project Based Learning
UCI, Vital Link and Orange County high schools and colleges are working together to organize a Rescue Robotics event in May of 2015. The Rescue Robotics challenge provides an opportunity for students in information and communication technology programs across Orange County to test their skills using ground and aerial robots to find and identify simulated human survivors.
Rescue Robotics Challenge Details
The Rescue Robotics competition has three main principles, each of which imposes difficult challenges on the student team which are important for the real world application of this kind of robot.
1 – Each robot must be safely autonomous. In other words, the robot needs to be programmed to do the work of finding survivors on its own without help from the student team. This is an important need if robots are to help us search disaster areas.
2 – The robot must work in the natural environment on uneven terrain, with variable sunlight and wind. This is a challenge for most robot sensors, but important in a real disaster situation.
3 – The teams are allowed to use up to five robots which can be either ground or aerial robots. More robots makes it easier to find survivors, but increases complexity of programming the communication and coordination of the search.
A speedy six-wheeled search robot that uses an Android phone as its processor.
Rescue Robotics Workshop
At a recent Rescue Robotics Workshop teachers from across Orange County learned to build and program ground robots that use an Android phone as the processor and sensor system. They also learned how to build a quadcopter with an Arduino processor to search from the air.
The quadcopter is a small and reliable aerial search robot.
Close-up on Arduino microprocessor apparatus on aerial robot.
Rescue Robotics is a project based learning program which is an extension of the Performance Engineering Program in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace engineering at UCI, in which UCI students learn racecar engineering, build a racecar, and put it in competition against other schools. The goal of both these classes is for students to learn engineering project skills and either take them to college or directly to industry.
Just like in UCI’s Racecar Engineering class, students create a useful product, which is just another goal of this educational program. The crucial difference between the two classes is that Rescue Robotics is focused on information and communication technology rather than engineering and manufacturing. Clearly the class involves engineering and manufacturing, but the spotlight is really on finding an effective and interesting way to teach students computer programming skills with real world application. An overarching goal of this program is to strengthen industry in Orange County by enrolling 17,000 Orange County students in healthcare, engineering, and information technology career paths by 2017-18.
Freshman Project: Quadcopters
The Rescue Robotics program has strong connections to the UCI Freshman Project course Engr 7, where Learning by doing in a competitive team environment has been proven to be an engaging, exciting, and effective way to teach engineering to students. Classes like this open up career and educational paths for students starting from a young age.
UCI’s freshman project class, Engineering 7, organized by Lily Wu, has over 200 new students building quadcopters. The two videos below show some of their work.
Read more
More about Rescue Robotics can be found at the Design News Blog.
Phantom: The AI-UCI collaboration
Phantom
The aluminum body developed at Art Institute for our monocoque racecar Phantom on display in the Engineering Gateway building at UCI.
Here is another look.
Phantom 2
Kinematics Summer School
Profs. Carl Nelson and Anurag Purwar organized a Summer School on Kinematic Theory at the University at Buffalo, New York as part of the 2014 ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences. Please select this link to get access to all of the talks: Kinematics Summer School.
Select this link for a YouTube playlist of the videos of each presentation.
My lecture on the synthesis of six-bar and eight-bar linkages is the third item on the playlist.
You can access a pdf of my talk at the link: Synthesis of Planar Six-bar and Eight-bar Linkages.
Among these is a nice presentation by Anurag Purwar on Quaternions and Clifford Algebras.
Introduction to Linkages
Introduction to Linkages
Please select this link to open the Geogebra Book containing constructions of a number of interesting linkages. This is an introduction to the useful movement available with articulated systems.
JPL’s ATHLETE Rover Walks, Rolls, and Slides
JPL’s ATHLETE Rover (image from paper cited below)
The ATHLETE Rover is a mixture of a wheeled rover and a walking robot, or better a walking truck, created by engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory to be used for manned and unmanned missions to the moon. ATHLETE, which stands for All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer, is a six-legged walker that is taller than a person. The walker also rolls since it has powered wheels at the end of each limb. This allows the ATHLETE great mobility over changing terrain.
An innovation that comes from the leg-wheel combo is the Sliding Gait, which is a mode of transport more efficient than walking that can be used over loose or steep terrain where driving is impossible. Sliding Gait uses some of the articulated legs as anchors while others do the walking or sliding, like skating. This allows for quicker more responsive movement of the robot. The ATHLETE is to be remote controlled from earth or by astronauts on the moon, so the many different ways the machine can travel give more options to a remote user to navigate tricky terrain.
ATHLETE at work (image from paper cited below)
Motion planning is critical to the operation of ATHLETE because it is both a walker, a rover and something in between, so it takes some work to plan out each step. Footfall is the software that assists the remote driver in planning each step. It uses “telemetry from the robot, such as joint angles and stereo camera image pairs, and generates 3D terrain map,” computes a sequence of movement commands and presents an animated preview to the driver. Footfall makes it possible for this big robot to really move.
Citations:
“FootFall: A Ground Based Operations Toolset Enabling Walking for the ATHLETE Rover,” by Vytas SunSpiral, Daniel Chavez-Clemente, Michael Broxton, Leslie Keely, Patrick Mihelich, David Mittman, and Curtis Collins.
“Sliding Gait for Athlete Mobility,” NASA Techbrief, This work was done by Julie A. Townsend, Curtis L. Collins, and Jeffrey J. Biesiadecki of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Read more about the ATHLETE Rover at JPL’s Website