Cyber-Infrastructure for Supporting K-12 Engineering Education through Robotics

Department of Computer ScienceDrexel UniversityWilliam Regli (PI)

Project Objectives

• Develop a multi-disciplinary approach to Engineering Informatics education

• Design curricular materials around the theme of bio-inspired and snake-inspired robots– Make materials accessible to undergraduates and high-school

students• Create cyber-tools for design/analysis of bio-inspired

robots• Create and populate a repository (i.e. cyber-

infrastructure) with information on bio-inspired robot design and dozens of template designs– Including full engineering models (CAD, Simulation, kinematics,

dynamics, etc

CI-TEAM: Creation and Use of Multi-Disciplinary Engineering Models

NSF CISE/SCI-0537370• Lead Institution: Drexel University

– William Regli (CS, PI), Michael Piasecki (CivE)– Engineering design, ontologies, knowledge rep

• University of Maryland @ College Park– SK Gupta (MechE)– Bio-inspired design, robotics, manufacturing

• University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill– Ming Lin and Dinesh Manocha (CS)– Physics-based modeling, 3D graphics

• University of Wisconsin @ Madison– Nicola Ferrier, Vadim Shapiro, Krishnan Suresh (MechE)– Engineering design, kinematics/dynamics, geometric representations

Project Activities• Team-taught multiple bio-robotics related

classes across several institutions• Students design, build, model and simulate full

bio-robots or bio-inspired mechanisms• Students learn multi-disciplinary modeling

– CAD/CAM (i.e. Pro/E, CATIA etc), Simulation (i.e. ADAMS, ODE, etc), Information Modeling (i.e. OWL, UML, etc)

• Result: Multi-disciplinary thinking about the design, fabrication, assembly, simulation and programming of bio-inspired robotic systems

Current “Lesson Learned”• Bio-robotic domain is a great motivator

– Students self-taught themselves basic CAD and tools like ADAMS in 2-3 weeks

• One has to be open to novel educational techniques– “Cheating” was encouraged, creativity was stress in

the integration of ideas and their transformation into new ideas

• Students integrated ideas from many previously unconnected academic areas– Physics, graphics, AI all meet biology and mechanical

engineering

Expected Outcomes

• Runs thru 2009• Production of dozens of models of bio-

inspired robots– Complete robots, robot sub-mechanisms– Simulation models, physics models

• Academic tools, commercial (ADAMS), etc

• Documented on project wikihttp://gicl.cs.drexel.edu

Q&AFor more information:

http://gicl.cs.drexel.edu/wiki/

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation Cyber-Infrastructure TEAMs Grants SCI-0537125 & OCI-0636273, CIBER-UGrant SCI-0537370 & OCI-0636235,

Multi-Disciplinary Engineering Models

With additional support from….