Robotic Hardware-in-the-loop Simulation:

This research attempts to develop a practical framework for the concurrent engineering of reconfigurable robot manipulators through the development of a hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform. Reconfigurable robot manipulators have recently received a growing increasing attention from both research community and industry for their potential benefits of versatility in task orientation and adaptation to changing environments. Design of such systems is complicated, as the conventional “decoupled” or “loosely coupled” approaches cannot provide satisfactory solutions with the proliferation of advanced high speed automation systems. This research addresses a knowledge-based concurrent analysis and synthesis methodology for the detail-level engineering of reconfigurable robot manipulators, with the aid of a scalable, object-oriented hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform. Key features of the platform are: hierarchical and modular architecture, knowledge-base capability, object-oriented modeling and design, reconfigurability and scalability, and distance communication between distributed designers and remote hardware/software modules.

Systematic Detail-level Concurrent Engineering of Mechatronic Systems:

This research attempts to develop a systematic and pragmatic methodology of concurrent design for mechatronic systems. The market-driven need for multidisciplinary design of mechatronic systems has recently been recognized by the research community and by funding organizations. However, much of the literature on mechatronics design focuses on specific applications, and the multidisciplinary design in them is mostly based on ad hoc strategies for incrementally changing the conventional sequential design into a subsystem-based methodology. This research utilizes a systematic methodology of encapsulating and embedding the designer’s qualitative knowledge at different stages into the system for addressing the entire process of mechatronics concurrent design, from conception to configuration to integration to realization and implementation.

Intelligent Multi-agent Robotic Systems:

This research studies the implementation of knowledge-base hierarchical control schemes for the collaboration and cooperation of a heterogeneous team of air and ground robots and manipulators. Using multiple robots with diverse capabilities can result in performing complex tasks by simple individual robot platforms, as can be observed repeatedly in the nature, such as insect colonies. The challenge, however, is to build a simple yet effective means of communication and knowledge integration. The focus of this research is on the methods of parsing the tasks of overall mission objectives and mapping them onto a heterogeneous group of robotic platforms, as well as techniques for the integration of perceptual information packets obtained from heterogeneous robots and their synthesis into a coherent picture for a remote operator’s situational awareness.

Object-oriented Modeling and Design of Aerospace Systems:

Interpretation of aerospace systems, in the form of mathematical textual coding, requires fundamental multidisciplinary knowledge and expertise. Hence, team work is an essential feature of aerospace systems design. Nonetheless, different disciplines conceptualize and represent their knowledge differently. Consequently, it becomes difficult for the participating disciplines to communicate their points of view, let alone collaborate with each other as required in a concurrent design. Hence, a unified system description language is essential for the concurrent design, which interprets different components of a, aerospace system without addressing their underlying theory. This research will extend the object-oriented modeling approach to concurrent design, through which various functional modules can be built and synthesized by integrating programmatic elements (mechanical, electronic, computer, etc.) from pre-assembled libraries of reusable components. Furthermore, a graphical design entry tool with guided and automatic synthesis features will present all functional modules as finite state machines, so that designers can combine them concurrently using a high-level state-flow language. The entire object-oriented interface provides the designers with a hierarchical abstraction from conceptualization through functional decomposition to detailed design.

Remotely Accessible Aerospace Experimentation:

This research attempts to establish a transformative vision of Remote Access Aerospace Laboratories for both pedagogical and research purposes. A common problem with presenting experimental research results in various communities, such as robotics and aerospace, is the lack of a "unique" setup by which the research hypotheses have been examined. In robotics, for example, a new control algorithm, works marvelously on a 4-degree-of-freedom robot with short links and comes to the literature as a breakthrough. But, later on another researcher argues that the same algorithm causes poor performance on a different robot. Thus, researchers of a community around the world would welcome a "unique remote-access laboratory" with which all the new research works are examined, so that experimental data and outcomes have a unified and consistent meaning for the entire community. For example, a central aerospace robotics laboratory, would be an interesting asset for the researchers around the world to access it remotely and perform their experiments.

Hybrid Framework for Mechatronics Pedagogy:

This research attempts to develop a hybrid framework for teaching mechatronics that synergistically utilizes the two rival learning theories, namely behaviourism and constructivism. Behaviourism conceives learning as dissemination of knowledge via abstract representation of reality, and thus prescribes teaching as transfer of the knowledge from expert to learner. On the other hand, constructivism sees knowledge as a subjective and dynamic product of knower’s experiential world constructed through the senses and social interactions, and thus defines the role of teacher not to dispense knowledge but to serve as a creative mediator and facilitator. The premise of this research is that teaching mechatronics requires both direct instruction and learner-controlled knowledge construction. Hence, both theories must be utilized in a unified framework. Such a framework can be built based on an instructional design theory, namely Elaboration Theory, which allows a gradual transition from content-based to activity-based learning process.