El-Sayed Aziz

Content-rich interactive online laboratory systems

Online learning environments are rapidly becoming viable options for offering students a bridge from theoretical concepts to practical engineering applications. They represent collections of integrated tools that provide a delivery mechanism for rich learning content, advanced assessment capabilities as well as affordable access to a wide range of educational resources. Such online learning environments have been used at Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT) for a number of years to provide undergraduate engineering students with a comprehensive laboratory experience based on content‐rich and flexible remote and virtual laboratory experiments. These Web‐based educational tools were developed using various open source programming languages and free software applications. As discussed in this article, these open source components form a powerful combination for the cost‐efficient development, implementation and sharing of Web‐based virtual experimentation systems. This article describes the delivery methods for online experiments and the corresponding software modules implemented, which were integrated into a comprehensive student laboratory experience currently being used at SIT in a sophomore‐level core undergraduate course on solid mechanics taken by all undergraduate engineering majors as well as in a junior‐level course on mechanisms and machine dynamics for mechanical engineering majors. Furthermore, some results of the learning outcomes assessment for online experiments conducted over several years at SIT are summarized.

A review of applications of computer games in education and training

Scientists, engineers and educators are increasingly using environments enabled by advanced cyberinfrastructure tools for their research, formal and informal education and training, career development and life-long learning. For instance, academic institutions as well as private training and education companies have recently started to explore the potential of commercially available multi-player computer game engines for the development of virtual environments for instructional purposes. Most of these developments are still in their early stages and are focused mainly on investigating the suitability of interactive games for remote user interaction, content distribution and collaborative activities. Some of the ongoing projects have additional research objectives, such as the analysis of patterns of human behavior and the study of the collaboration between users and their interaction with virtual environments. A few other developments are aimed at utilizing computer game technologies as a platform for personnel training and educational laboratory simulations. This paper provides a review of the current state of computer game applications, with a special focus on education and training implementations.

Teaching and learning enhancement in undergraduate machine dynamics

Currently, information technology (IT) is playing a significant role in the development of learning environments. The integration of IT into the classroom provides innovative learning environments that allow for more interactive, relevant, and effective applications to give students valuable experiences. This article presents the design and implementation of more active and collaborative methods of teaching and learning in a course on mechanisms and machine dynamics. Through the use of virtual collaborative environments such as cooperative learning, problem‐based learning (PBL), critical thinking, and more in the context of IT‐enabled environments, students are given the opportunity to experiment with ideas and see the results of their efforts on the computer screen. These interactive learning modules impose more responsibility on students for their own learning than the traditional lecture‐based passive learning methodology.

A decision-making framework model for design and manufacturing of mechanical transmission system development

Knowledge-based systems are proving to be a powerful tool with great potential for developing intelligent design support environments to improve quality of products and reduce product development costs by eliminating or minimizing many of the trial-and-error iterations involved in product development. This article describes an approach towards the development of intelligent design support environments for mechanical transmission systems, along with implementation details of a distributed knowledge-based gearing design and manufacturing system that is deployed over the Internet. The system embodies the various tasks of the design process, with modules that address: performance evaluation, process optimization, manufacturability analysis, and provides reasoning and decision-making capabilities for reducing the time between gear tooth creation, detailed design and final production. This methodology is highly desirable in that it is able to simulate real working conditions, evaluate and optimize the design effectively, prevent designers from time-consuming iterations and reduce long and expensive test phases.

REAL-TIME 3D MODEL RECONSTRUCTION AND INTERACTION USING KINECT FOR A GAME-BASED VIRTUAL LABORATORY

Over the last few years, academic institutions have started to explore the potential of using computer game engines for developing virtual laboratory environments. Recent studies have shown that developing a realistic visualization of a physical laboratory space poses a number of challenges. A significant number of modifications are required for adding customized interactions that are not built into the game engine itself. For example, a major challenge in creating a realistic virtual environment using a computer game engine is the process of preparing and converting custom models for integration into the environment, which is too complicated to be performed by untrained users. This paper describes the usage of the Microsoft Kinect for rapidly creating a 3D model of an object for implementation in a virtual environment by retrieving the object’s depth and RGB information. A laboratory experiment was selected to demonstrate how real experimental components are reconstructed and embedded into a game-based virtual laboratory by using the Kinect. The users are then able to interact with the experimental components. This paper presents both the technical details of the implementation and some initial results of the system validation.

Capturing Assembly Constraints of Experimental Setups in a Virtual Laboratory Environment

Recently, multi-player game engines have been explored regarding their potential for implementing virtual laboratory environments for engineering and science education. In these developments, the virtual assembly process of the laboratory equipment is a critical step, and a detailed formalized description of how different components of the experimental equipment are to be joined in the assembly process is necessary. This description includes the joint types (lower and upper kinematic pairs) and the associated degrees of freedom, the resulting mobility of the assembly as well as the joint fit requirements.In this paper, a formalized representation of the assembly process that captures the information on the joint kinematics and the components’ degrees of freedom generated when assembling laboratory equipment in a virtual laboratory environment will be discussed. A planetary gear train system will be used as an example to illustrate the proposed method. In particular, the structure of the assembly of a planetary gear train system involves assembly constraints between a group of components (sun, planet and ring gears, shafts, planet carrier assembly, etc.) that generate the desired relationship between the input and output motions. This paper will identify important requirements for modeling different configurations of planetary gear train assemblies within a game-based virtual laboratory environment. These requirements include the positioning and the orienting of the components, the verification of the kinematic joints, the propagation of the mating constraints and the capturing of the joint attributes.Copyright

Design and Implementation of a Virtual Laboratory for Machine Dynamics

Laboratory experiments are considered to be a crucial component of engineering and science curricula by all stakeholders in the education process. In traditional laboratories, students develop practical skills and become effective professionals. However, the major drawbacks of traditional laboratories are their high demand on resources, significant maintenance costs and the inability to delivery the laboratory content in distance education. Virtual laboratory experiments represent a valuable option for educational laboratories, due to their advantages over traditional hands-on as well as remote experiments, including the ease of reconfiguring the experimental system, the high flexibility in the input specifications, the possibility of conducting experiments using devices otherwise infeasible and the option of re-running experiments multiple times. In response to the need for developing laboratory resources that provide a practical experience to online engineering students, this paper describes a simulation-based virtual laboratory, which is used at Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT) in a junior-level course on mechanisms and machine dynamics as a compliment to experimental work in the traditional hands-on laboratory. This virtual laboratory system alleviates the space, time and cost constraints associated with traditional laboratories and serves as an efficient teaching aid. It conveys to the students practical issues associated with actual experiments and provides learning outcomes that are comparable to those of traditional physical laboratories. The students have the opportunity to explore a wide range of experimental configurations and parameters. In addition, the system includes a realistic rendering of the experimental setup and its components, thus providing the students with a strong feeling of immersion, as if they were performing an experiment in a traditional laboratory.

An Intelligent Design System for Agile Design and Manufacturing of Mechanical Transmission Systems

Product development is a process with complicated procedures, which incorporate many aspects of knowledge, experience and teamwork. Specifically, mechanical system design requires an iterative process to determine the desired component design parameters that would satisfy kinematic, performance and manufacturability requirements, which would result in an efficient and reliable operation of speed reduction units. This article describes an approach towards the development of intelligent design support environments for mechanical transmission systems, along with implementation details of a distributed knowledge-based gearing design and manufacturing system that is deployed over the Internet. The system embodies the various tasks of the design process, with modules that address: performance evaluation, process optimization, manufacturability analysis, and provides reasoning and decision-making capabilities for reducing the time between gear tooth creation, detailed design and final production. This methodology is highly desirable in that it is able to simulate real working conditions, evaluate and optimize the design effectively, prevent designers from time-consuming iterations and reduce long and expensive test phases. In an application example relating to process design of a forged gearing system, once a successful power rating is achieved within the design environment through FEA based techniques, the system automatically feeds input parameters into the manufacturing module which carries out all process design and planning stages. Estimation of the number of preforming stages, generation of detail die drawings, and forging load and energy requirements are calculated based on available material design databases, knowledge-based rules and feature-level calculations. Utilization of the World Wide Web, as a medium for the implementation of gear design and its agile manufacturing over the Internet is also being demonstrated. A combination of HTML, JavaScript, VRML, CGI Script and C++ based procedures is used to bring this capability to users distributed anywhere in the world. With the above developments, the problems of experience and expertise for the designers are overcome and unexpected design iterations that cause wastage of engineering time and effort, are avoided. The environment can be easily enhanced with other types of gearing systems.© 2003 ASME

Linking Computer Game Engines With Remote Experiments

Recently, the potential of using commercially available computer game engines to implement virtual engineering experiments (which represent pure computer simulations) has been explored by various educational institutions. Using a game engine in conjunction with a corresponding software development kit, it is possible for educators to replace the content of an existing computer game with educational content, thus creating virtual laboratory environments. The utilization of game engines for educational purposes is expected to increase the degree of immersive presence of the students engaging in such game-based laboratory exercises as well as the level of interactivity between the students. This paper will discuss the integration of a game-based virtual laboratory environment with remote experiments conducted using actual physical devices. In particular, the paper will focus on possible ways in which the data transfer between a computer game engine and an existing remote laboratory experiment can be accomplished. Strategies for the extraction of laboratory experiment data and for the conversion of data formats are discussed. Possible methods by which the laboratory experiment output data is accessed and displayed are also addressed. Some of the key questions affecting the possible process flows are if and at what point the laboratory experiment mode of interaction should switch from the game engine to the remote laboratory experiment and then switch back to the game engine, and whether or not the user should know that and when it occurred. Finally, the paper will present a sample implementation of a virtual laboratory, into which a specific remote experiment was integrated.Copyright

Virtual Mechanical Assembly Training Based on a 3D Game Engine

ABSTRACTDesigned for personal computers, 3D video games are powerful tools with respect to graphics rendering, real world physics simulation, human-computer interaction and multi-user communication. Because of these favorable features of 3D games, their adaption for serious applications has been widely researched recently. These applications generally focus on topics such as real world scenario reconstruction, which require no or only minor development efforts on the game engines themselves. Contrary to this, the development of virtual education and training environments requires the integration of complex engineering systems into games, which poses greater challenges and thus causes this topic to be covered less frequently. This article presents a framework for authoring virtual environments (VEs) for mechanical assembly training using a commercially available 3D game engine. The VE presented here allows multiple users to conduct simulations of assembly procedures in a collaborative manner and provides a...