The goal of this mini-workshop is to increase the participants' knowledge of current opportunities at the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support excellence in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. In particular, the discussion focuses on new and current opportunities in the Division of Undergraduate Education as well as highlight examples of project activities that support these opportunities. The mini-workshop uses a highly interactive format, using team-based games and discussion, to engage the participants and to foster the sharing of ideas, to clarify misconceptions, and to potentially initiate new ideas in engineering education innovations and research. This mini-workshop closely encourages the sharing of ideas and interaction amongst peers, and also informs participants about current NSF funding opportunities in STEM education.

With emphasis on project outcomes and impact, project evaluation is increasingly becoming an integral part of a NSF project. Lack of an evaluation plan in a proposal for an education project may be viewed by many NSF reviewers as a weakness. The purpose of this workshop is to give the participants enough background information so that they can work with an external evaluator to develop and implement an evaluation plan for an education research and development project, particularly NSF project.

Evaluation is an old concept and, at least implicitly, all faculty members do it. So why should you attend a workshop on the subject? Here are a few reasons: (1) More NSF reviewers expect to see an evaluation plan in a proposal. (2) To ensure educational research progresses, we must know what works and how well it works. (3) Properly done, formative evaluation can direct you to more effective teaching. (4) Defendable data can help administrators make fair and quantifiable performance appraisals. This workshop will not make you an evaluation expert but it will enable you to collaborate more effectively with evaluation experts. You will be able to apply evaluation methods in your classroom and you will be able to read and comprehend evaluation plans for projects. After the session, you will be able to recognize basic terminology, list the importance of goals, outcomes and questions and describe how they comprise an evaluation plan. You will learn about several evaluation tools and be able to discuss some of their advantages, limitations and appropriateness. You will be able to list confounding factors in data interpretation and explain multiple interpretations.

Don't give me the theory, just show me how to do it! Have your students ever said that? Theory is what allows someone to know why something works and whether you might expect it to work in a new context. Education theory does the same, yet the theories and principles are difficult to gather, digest and apply. This workshop is intended to introduce a small but effective set of learning theories. You will not be an expert, but you should be able to develop proposal ideas that are founded on proven theories.

Contact formations have proven useful for programming robots by demonstration for operations involving contact. These techniques require real time recognition of contact formations. Single ended contact formation (SECF) classifiers using only the force/torque measured at the wrist of the robot have been shown to be quite effective for this purpose. To function properly, however, previous SECF classifiers have required a sizable training set and a constant pose between the force/torque sensor and the manipulated object. Thus, if an object is re-grasped and the pose changes, one expects to have to repeat the creation of the training set. We discuss the impact of sensor-object pose changes have on two successful classifiers. Experimental data shows that they perform poorly when sensor-object pose changes. We discuss a method to regain the performance of both classifiers while minimizing the retraining necessary.

Ideally, one would design a manipulator to be as rigid as possible. However there may be some occasions when the manipulator will be flexible. This will occur when the manipulator is very long and lightweight. Traditional flexible manipulators are difficult to control. This is because the manipulator has a nonlinear position variant behavior. Unfortunately using a large gear reduction does not reduce the nonlinearities in the flexible modes as it does in rigid manipulators. As a result, high performance controllers will inevitably be nonlinear themselves. To make matters worse, the parameters of the system are difficult to estimate so the control needs to be robust as well. The paper makes the point that rather than designing a controller that handles a complex system, one might build a flexible manipulator that exhibits simpler dynamic behavior than current designs. Specifically, the paper demonstrates how one can design a two dimensional flexible manipulator so that its fundamental vibration frequency is nearly independent of the rigid body position of the links. Analysis demonstrates the fundamental concept involved and experimental data verifies the analysis. What remains to be shown in future work are two points: 1) that a simple robust controller can damp the vibration of the mechanism; 2) that the extra complexity introduced by the new mechanism produces no overall negative effect.

Finding the sensor-to-tool frame is essential when a sensor is mounted on the dexterous end of a robot for application in either feedback control or kinematic calibration. Many researchers have provided closed-form solutions to the sensor-to-tool frame identification for applications in feedback control. The solutions provided in the literature however, apply only to sensors capable of providing complete pose (three positions and three orientations) of the measured object and to robots capable of providing complete pose of its end frame. Many sensors, however, are capable of providing only position, information. In addition, some robots, like telerobots and other velocity-commanded devices, do not provide tool pose information. This paper provides closed-form solutions for three applications: (1) when a position only sensor is mounted on a robot that provides full tool pose information, (2) when a full pose sensor is used on a robot which can neither provide tool pose information, nor move precise amounts, and (3) when a position only sensor is used on a robot without tool pose information.

A sensor has been developed and successfully implemented to automate robot calibration. Its simple design makes it ideal for production environments. It works in conjunction with precision spheres that are mounted in the workspace. The relative positions of the spheres are measured in advance, and the sensor is positioned over them automatically and precisely. The positioning of the sensor is governed by three light beams that define position with respect to the sensor. This eliminates the problems experienced by other short range devices in that it acts digitally and without contact. Design of the sensor and its autonomous control from a PC are presented along with proven measurement tactics and results of performance tests.

After writing programs for a production robot, an operator must manually teach hundreds or thousands of poses. Teaching poses is extremely time consuming and, unfortunately, periodic reteaching is necessary. The need to reteach is commonly due to: wear, repair, slight movements of workpieces, or replacement of the robot and its tools. Our experience has shown that conventional methods of adjusting pose data do not work reliably. This paper discusses an automatic reteach method. The method has been tested on a production robot in a laboratory environment. In spite of changes in the robot and environment, we want constant shaped and sized tools to arrive consistently at taught work locations within desired tolerances. This means tool pose relative to the work piece is invariant. To assure this invariance, we establish a coordinate frame on the work piece and identify the tool locations relative to this frame. We apply a calibration algorithm to the pose data to accomplish our goal. This paper demonstrates an automatic, economic implementation of kinematic calibration on an industrial manipulator. The method is retrofit to a manufacturing system and does not require real time solution of the calibrated inverse kinematic problem. As a result, the method applies to most manipulators in use today.>

A video-based pose sensor is presented that overcomes some of the common problems with typical robotic pose sensors. The Targeting and Reflective Alignment Concept (TRAC) sensor operates using the optics of reflection. TRAC is a robust sensor capable of both continuous and discrete pose sensing in the presence of a class of disturbance inputs (extraneous lighting). Key features of the sensor are its high sensitivity to orientation error, its decoupled handling of orientation and translation (without calibration transformations), and its ability to provide intuitive feedback to a human operator for tele-operation. The sensor has been shown successful at target tracking with a PUMA manipulator in the laboratory and in automatic positioning of NASA-JSC's Manipulator Development Facility (MDF) telemanipulator arm used for shuttle astronaut training.>

A robust control method which can overcome the disturbances and parameter uncertainties of a robot manipulator is proposed. This sliding-mode-based technique provides performance robustness that guarantees the system attractiveness to a certain linear surface if the so-called matching conditions and bounds on perturbations and modeling errors are satisfied. The performance and robustness characteristics can be separated into two cascaded loops, an internal one that guarantees the surface attraction or linearization robustness and an external one that designs a controller based on the linearized system. The technique is applied to a two-bar robot with a spring at the end effector as an unknown interaction with the environment and an external load disturbance.>

Kane's method, a powerful tool for deriving equations of motion of complex rigid-body systems, is extended to continuous flexible systems. Kane's equations are derived using energy concepts and without introducing the Passerello-Huston equations. The result is an energy method for deriving equations of motion of complex nonholonomic systems. Since the derivation does not require the introduction of coordinate transformations, equations are in a simple form. The powerful technique in Kane's method whereby generalized speeds are defined can also be applied.>

A method for performing forward kinematic calibration of manipulators having one or more closed-loop-actuated joints is presented. The technique is an extension of algorithms designed for open-loop jointed manipulators. The calibration is equivalent to minimizing an objective function subject to constraints. The objective function is taken as the integral of end-effector position and orientation error. The constraints arise from the closed-loop mechanisms present in the manipulator.>

The objective of robot calibration is to identify all parameters in a robot model so that the model represents the true robot. Each model has its own set of parameters. The authors prove that regardless of the kinematic model chosen, there are a maximum number of parameters that must be determined, implying that model accuracy cannot be improved by adding parameters. In addition, the authors demonstrate how to model any manipulator so that a minimum size Jacobian is used, thus reducing the computation required for calibration.>

There is a considerable amount of literature dealing with robot calibration. A classification hierarchy of calibration procedures is discussed which groups robot calibration by objective. The state of the art for each classification is discussed with citations from recent literature. Several proposed models are described. Based upon the common assumption of all lower pair joints, three concepts are discussed which may be applied for comparing most of the calibration models proposed in the literature. These concepts are completeness, equivalence, and proportionality. Each of these are discussed in detail in the text. Attention is also paid to the possibility that joints may actually be higher pairs. Although this possibility is commonly accepted in coordinate measuring machine calibration, it is not widely recognized in the robot literature. The paper discusses possible causes and effects of higher order joint pairs and demonstrates how they might be modeled.

The following paper demonstrates how finite element methods can be applied to approximating inverse kinematic solutions of robot, manipulators. The method demonstrated in this paper is unique to previous work on this subject in that it requires computation of only the forward solution and not the inverse. This is significant when the robot geometry is too complex to yield an easily obtainable inverse solution. After computation of the approximating solution, the actual kinematic solution of the robot is obtained by interpolating across an element, as in typical finite element problems. In this case element node values represent joint configurations rather than the more common elastic displacement or stress. The approximation is obtained by dividing the workspace into an element grid, and minimizing a potential function to obtain the best fit node values of joint configuration. An example is included.