Judy M. Vance - US grants

The objective of this research is to develop a technique that allows a designer to play an active role in the design optimization process. This research combines fast optimization methods, based on sensitivity analysis, with virtual reality techniques to provide an interactive method for design optimization. Fast optimization methods are needed to allow large design problems to be investigated in an interactive time frame. Virtual reality techniques provide an interactive environment for the designer to investigate multiple design changes. Keeping the designer active in the design process allows the designer to use all of his/her prior knowledge about the problem to be brought to bear to achieve a viable, optimal solution to the problem in a timely manner. Design is an interactive process that often involves trade- offs between competing performance criteria. For example, designers strive to design vehicles that are both lightweight and strong. Design of large structural systems is accomplished through the aid of sophisticated optimization software. Currently, the interaction a designer has with the optimization process is limited to the initial stages of problem definition, where the designer specifies an objective function, design parameters, and constraints. As the design process progresses, design objectives and constraints are often modified based on the designer's experience, in order to achieve a viable solution.

9625601 Vance This NSF Career Award will fund research into (1) the use of virtual reality techniques to improve product design and (2) the implementation of active learning techniques in the engineering classroom. Areas of design where virtual reality can contribute to the design of better products will be identified and appropriate virtual tools will be developed. In particulars, focus of the research will be on the design of spatial mechanisms and visualization techniques to advance cross-attribute design of large, complex systems. Results of this research in cross-attribute design will be incorporated into a new course in finite element-based optimization. The educational activities focus on searching out and implementing effective teaching methods that will improve student learning. Study groups of interested engineering faculty will be formed to learn about active teaching strategies. Several faculty learning groups will be facilitated. The research funded under this award will provide a template for both the development of virtual reality applications to improve product design and a process to integrate active learning techniques in the engineering classroom. Virtual reality techniques applied to product design will result in the ability to design in a fully three-dimensional design space, and result in reducing the number of physical prototypes needed before production runs are scheduled. Personnel involved in the design process who are not accustomed to viewing three-dimensional models on a computer screen will be able to bring their expertise to bear early in the design process because of the advanced visualization and interaction capabilities available through the use of virtual reality.

This award provides funding to develop a new and innovative approach to designing spatial mechanisms based on the use of virtual reality technology. A virtual environment, which will include a variety of visual, audio, and haptic interactive devices, will be created and used to design novel spatial mechanisms. New analytical techniques for spatial mechanism design, which fully utilize the capabilities of the virtual design environment, will be generated and incorporated into the design software. Computer models of objects within the operational workspace of the mechanism will be displayed in the virtual environment and consideration of the interaction of the mechanism with these objects will become an integral part of the design process. This development will be a testbed for the use of virtual reality in mechanical design. Some of the major challenges in designing spatial mechanisms for practical applications include the need to specify design positions in three-dimensional space and verify the operation of these mechanisms in their operational workspace. If successful, this research will result in a computer tool that utilizes novel spatial mechanism design methodologies to generate a three-dimensional design space in which the designer can synthesize spatial mechanisms and obtain a sense of the form and function of the devices. This would enable spatial mechanisms to be incorporated into many products, including manufacturing and automation equipment and consumer products. As a result of this research, new advancements in spatial mechanism design methodology and new knowledge pertaining to the use of virtual environments as a mechanical design tool are likely.

This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award provides funds to create a three-dimensional, full-immersion, synthetic environment, which will be known as the C6. This facility will include a room where all four walls, the floor and the ceiling are projection screens that are capable of displaying back-projected stereoscopic images, thus providing total immersion of the participants. A position tracking system will facilitate tracking of various users inside the space, providing the ability for three-dimensional interactions between the users and their simulations. Audio feedback and haptic display will further enhance the immersive experience.
The C6 will be the only facility of its kind in the United States, one of three in the world. It will enable researchers to gain new understandings of fundamental phenomena with applications in virtual prototyping, product development, human-enhanced dynamic data exploration, immersive architectural modeling, and a wide variety of human-in-the-loop applications. The C6 will also be part of a test bed for cross-disciplinary collaboration across geographically separated virtual worlds, a new field that promises to revolutionize the way engineers and scientists cooperate.

Recent changes in the global business environment dictate the need for engineering technicians to obtain new skills in design-for-manufacturability, computer-aided design, teamwork, and communication. In addition, there is a significant workforce shortage of engineering technicians across the U.S. and particularly within the areas of Iowa and South Dakota served by this project. This project focuses on improving the way that the above topics are taught in community college manufacturing education programs. It also focuses on increasing the pool of qualified applicants to these programs. Four, flexible course modules and instructor-training materials are being developed that may be infused into a wide range of existing curricula. The modules integrate design for manufacturability, teamwork skills and computer aided-design content to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of instruction. Summative evaluation tools are being used to assess the impacts of the modules on student skills.

Women who are completing an internship in a baccalaureate program in technical training are delivering a program designed to recruit female students into manufacturing-related programs at three Midwestern community colleges. In addition, these interns are supporting community college technical instruction to supplement release time for community college instructors who are involved in this project.

An outcome of this project is larger numbers of better prepared workers that will lead to a more competitive U.S. manufacturing industry. The eventual impact on students is a heightened awareness of the interaction between design and manufacturing, and the skills to effectively operate in a team environment.

This grant provides funding for the development of a virtual reality-based tool to be used in the design of products that are subject to critical stress and/or fluid flow constraints. The primary goal of this research is to develop a methodology that couples computer-aided-design (CAD) models with analysis models and allows shape changes to be performed in real time in a three-dimensional virtual environment. This tool will couple the CAD geometry model to the analysis model of a product and provide a three-dimensional environment to allow for investigation of the effect that shape changes have on the stress or fluid flow distribution within the product. A critical component to this research is the development of fast approximation or calculation methods for stress analysis and fluid flow analysis that will allow for immediate display in the virtual environment. A method of transferring the final shape of the product back to the CAD environment will be developed. Haptics, in the form of force feedback, will be an integral part of the virtual environment and will provide additional information to the participants concerning the feasibility of the design and the impact that the shape changes have on assembly with other parts in the product design.

If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in concurrent design methods and result in reduced product development time. Participants from diverse backgrounds such as engineering, marketing, and manufacturing will benefit from the use of this methodology in the virtual environment because the environment more closely mimics the real world than does the traditional monitor, mouse and keyboard computer interface. Providing this design/analysis environment will encourage the quick investigation of many possible shape changes and how they affect the final product assembly and operation.

While the number of women engineering faculty in entry-level positions continues to grow, the demographics of the engineering academy clearly show a scarcity of women in mid-career and senior-level faculty positions. Although individual institutions can progress in their efforts to increase the participation of women engineering faculty in leadership positions, the scarcity and isolation of women engineering faculty make change slow and difficult without the support of faculty from other institutions. Therefore, it is imperative that steps be taken to connect women engineering faculty members from around the country to discuss and explore the challenges and opportunities of academic leadership.

We propose to catalyze widespread institutional change through the development of the "Women Engineering Faculty Leadership Network," a central training and mentoring program/community for 1) transformative leadership skills development; 2) mentoring support for women engineering faculty, and 3) making critical connections between existing organizations that provide services supporting women engineers both in education and industry. Transformative leadership is founded on the concept of collaborative leadership, i.e., leadership that is shared among members of an organization. This form of leadership emphasizes the importance of trust, open communication, shared vision, and shared power. The core of collaborative leadership is a commitment to enhancing the human capital of another for the advancement of a common cause; it is a model of stewardship that can affect change at all levels, from eliminating the micro-climate inequities found in departments to reshaping the broader aspects of institutional culture. We propose to bring these future women faculty leaders together in a supportive environment to learn transformative leadership techniques, which are not commonly practiced by the male-dominated faculty in their own institution, and to partner them with successful women academic leaders who can help prepare them for the challenges of academic leadership.

This proposal seeks to bring women engineering faculty together to effect institutional change through a grassroots effort to increase the number and rank of women engineers in academic leadership positions nationwide. To accomplish this goal we propose sponsoring Leadership Development Conferences, Advanced Leadership Conferences, SWE conference workshop, an Institutional Transformation/Advance Leadership Workshop and a Leadership Summit, as well as creating a unique women faculty mentoring e-community. We believe these activities will have a major impact on transforming the academic environment across the nation by including gender-equity issues in leadership training material and transforming the paradigm of academic roles and rewards.

This proposal is being submitted as a collaborative proposal between Iowa State University, Louisiana State University, University of Central Florida, University of Connecticut, Syracuse University, and the University of Utah with collaborators from the University of Texas, El Paso, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, University of Connecticut, University of California, Davis, University of Guelph, Canada, and Kettering University. Other faculty from Howard University, Texas Christian University, and Northeastern University have agreed to serve on the Executive Board of the project.

Broader Impacts
Broaden Participation of Underrepresented Groups: The networking, training, and web-centered mentoring will support the professional development of women engineering faculty and, specifically, leadership development. The importance of diversity is central to this proposal.
Enhance Infrastructure for Research and Education: This program will enhance the organizational and human infrastructure of academic institutions. The partnering in the proposed activities crosses geographical, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries. The broader impact of this program will include a cadre of leaders who will help to motivate and sustain a new paradigm of academic roles and rewards.
Broad Dissemination: The program will result in a new network of mentors. The program will build new connections among organizations, which will serve to both broaden and strengthen diversity efforts.
Benefits to Society: Leadership is essential to institutional change, and the leadership model in this program is founded on values that will improve the institution and its ability to serve society.

This objective of this collaborative research project is so that researchers at Iowa State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can look at ways to improve the design and manufacturing of compliant mechanisms through the use of virtual reality. Unlike the traditional rigid-link mechanisms, compliant mechanisms achieve motion guidance via the compliance and deformation of the mechanism's members. Design of compliant mechanisms currently occurs through the work of two distinctly different research communities: the mechanism design community, which bases designs on numerical simulation and optimization, e.g. topology synthesis, of basic design parameters, and the precision machine design community, where design engineers rely largely upon constraint-based methods that are heavily dependant upon the experience of the designer. Virtual reality will be used to provide a three-dimensional immersive design environment where compliant mechanism design can be achieved using mathematical rigor coupled with a designer's intuitive understanding of mechanism mechanics to design three-dimensional compliant mechanisms.

This work will change the way students, scientists, and engineers think about, conceptualize, and engineer compliant mechanisms for precision instruments, MEMS, NEMS, compliant robotics and low-cost mechanisms for consumer products, by establishing an engineering framework for design of compliant mechanisms based on constraint-based compliant mechanism design theory and virtual reality. Virtual reality, combined with powerful and rational constraint-based design methods, will provide a natural three-dimensional design environment where engineers can rapidly explore the design space to generate constraint-based design concepts (topology), evaluate the concepts and perform detailed design. The resulting design framework will allow a broader group of engineers to design complex compliant mechanisms, giving them new options to draw upon when searching for design solutions to critical problems, resulting in novel mechanism solutions for manufacturing and product design.

The research objective of this GOALI award is to develop and evaluate methods to support natural human interaction with digital CAD models with a focus on simulating manual assembly tasks in an immersive virtual environment. A hybrid method is developed which combines voxel-based collision detection and haptic rendering with enforcement of geometric constraints. An intelligent algorithm to manage the tradeoffs between the voxel-based collision detection and the enforcement of geometric constraints is a key component of this research. Evaluation will include both controlled experiments with students and a protocol analysis of the impact of the system on John Deere employees. The affordance of physical assembly provided by the virtual environment and the potential impact this capability has on the work actions of John Deere engineers will be examined. The participation of the Deere employees is a key component of this research as the system's application to a real-world manufacturing context could not be assessed without the active participation and close collaboration of our industrial collaborators.

If successful, the results of this research will have significant impact on engineering design and manufacturing. It will open many doors for the use of virtual reality as a product prototyping tool. In the design process, for example, design for assembly relies on designing to accommodate an operator?s ability to use tools, position components, attach parts, and reorient assemblies. All of these actions rely on humans interacting naturally with product geometry. Faster, easier prototyping through natural interaction with CAD models is a key component for achieving better product designs at reduced cost. Design for maintenance and training will also be positively impacted by this research. The results of the research will be disseminated broadly through journal papers, conference presentations, and demonstrations at technical meetings. Outreach in the form of hands-on demonstrations and workshop activities are planned for K-12 students through collaborations with the Program for Women in Science and Engineering and the Society of Women Engineers student section. Women and underrepresented groups will be recruited as part of the research team through partnerships with an existing ISU NSF Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate program and an ISU NSF Research for Undergraduates Site program.

The research objective of this collaborative award is to explore and evaluate new design processes, based on immersive technology, that support design team interaction in ways that result in designs that could not be achieved with traditional interfaces. These methods will be grounded in two distinct research fields: analytic methods for tradeoff analysis under uncertainty (University of Illinois) and the use of virtual reality techniques for product design (Iowa State University). Using these new methods, designers will be able to see and, where appropriate, feel the tradeoffs resulting from potential design changes in multiple realms and over the entire product lifecycle. The three major realms include: a visual and tactile sense of attribute tradeoffs, a sense of the difficulty of operations such as disassembly or repair, and time-lapse visualization of the effect of uncertainty. Test-beds for John Deere and Boeing will by employed. The impact of this research will be to provide a powerful new approach to complex product/system design which utilizes both analytical methods and immersive design computer technologies.

If successful, these approaches will result in the creation of unique new products, as the far reaching effects of potential design changes will be seen, felt and experienced by members of the design team. Resources will be used more efficiently, since their economic, technical and environmental value throughout the product lifecycle will be visually represented for the design team. A set of design case studies will be developed and made freely available on the web for educational purposes. These case studies will be integrated into engineering-oriented industrially sponsored senior design courses. With the case studies' special emphasis on a realistic experience of the collaborative design process, anticipated impacts include increased participation and retention of women in engineering. New technology will be transferred to industry through student/industry projects. Design of the educational materials will follow current guidelines on "changing the conversation" to reflect the diversity of engineering in all aspects.

The objective of this EAGER award is to assess the performance of users in a large space virtual environment equipped with haptic interaction in order to achieve a more realistic assembly workspace simulation. To achieve this objective, a new method of using a haptic device in a large space virtual environment will be developed and tested. The approach to providing haptic interaction in a large space virtual environment is to combine a six-degree-of-freedom haptic device with a mobile powered platform. Large space virtual environments can consist of arrangements of large screen projection systems that support position tracking and stereo viewing or rooms that have large area tracking combined with head mounted displays. Placing the haptic device on a mobile platform will allow the investigators to use this haptic device in the projection screen environment as well as the large area tracked room. The mobile platform will be position tracked so that the investigators can control the relative movement of the haptic device with respect to the user. The intent is that the user would not actively move the platform around the space, but that the mobile platform would be intelligent enough to follow the user as he/she moves around in the space.

The successful completion of this research has great potential to improve product design. With the expansion of force feedback to encompass the full area of an assembly workstation, virtual reality technology can be used by manufacturing engineers to prototype how humans interact with products during part assembly, long before the first part reaches the assembly station. Using CAD models and haptic devices in a large scale virtual environment, product design teams can explore the human/product/workstation interaction that affects worker ergonomics, fixture and tooling design. Other product designers can explore human/product interaction as they design safety measures and develop maintenance methods. In-depth evaluations using CAD models early in the design process can save re-work and re-design which add unnecessary costs to the final product. As a part of this award, the PIs will engage students from multiple disciplines in the research. As a result, these students will experience a meaningful multidisciplinary design project and leave with an understanding and appreciation for the knowledge that can be contributed from people who come from different disciplines.

This Proposal # 1138615 titles " Workshop on Navigating and Leading Change" is a continuation of the development of a community within the American Society of Mechanical Engineers that supports and mentors researchers from underrepresented groups. The previous workshop conducted through ASME focused on networking and teaching negotiation skills, in addition to facilitating the formation of networks during the workshop itself.
The workshop is designed to provide graduate students, post-doc and faculty members with professional development activities and to give them the opportunity to make connections with an international network of supportive researchers in their field. This conference attracts up to 1100 attendees from all over the world. The proportion of majority-to-minority and male-to-female attendees at the conference reflects the overall low representation of women and minorities in the mechanical engineering profession.

This workshop will continue the efforts of the Broadening Participation committee of the ASME to provide professional development opportunities to members from underrepresented groups. The goal of the Broadening Participation committee is to develop, implement and oversee new and existing activities aimed at broadening the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in the activities of Design Engineering Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The workshop will introduce the Lifecycle model of understanding self and change. The participants will leave with an appreciation of this systems' approach to understanding and affecting change, and applying what they learn in different situations of their career.

The proposed planning activity seeks to establish a new Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) site at Iowa State University of the existing Center for e-Design. The center currently involves six universities -Virginia Tech as lead, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Central Florida, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Buffalo, and Brigham Young University. The specific needs within the Center to be met by Iowa State University are focused in the following areas: 1) information technology strategies and optimization of products and systems, 2) design education and training, 3) early stage design theories and methodologies, 4) robotics and sensor integration, 5) materials, manufacturing and design, and 6) design for sustainability.

The proposed new site, in combination with the existing center plans to build innovation capacity by developing methods and tools that support the realization of new virtual simulation and design paradigms for development of new engineered products and systems. The outcomes from the center have the potential to broadly impact the public and private sectors through impact on manufacturing. The site plans to have a significant impact on students via a broad range of mechanism from curriculum to design experiences. The PI and other Iowa State faculty have a documented history of recruiting women and minority graduate and undergraduate students. Research and educational findings will be disseminated nationally and have significant broader impact through industrial collaboration and technology transfer.

1160985 Iowa State University; Janis Terpenny

This proposal seeks support for Iowa State University (ISU) to join the NSF IUCRC Center for e-Design as a full university member research site. The Center for e-design is currently comprised of Virginia Tech (lead), Carnegie Mellon University, Brigham Young University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Central Florida, and the University of Buffalo.

Iowa State University has faculty and student researchers working in areas that are synergistic with the mission and vision of the existing Center for e-Design. The addition of Iowa State strengthens the presence of the center and its role as a significant national resource capable of the following results: 1) inclusion of a multi-disciplinary viewpoint needed to ensure the development of a new paradigm of excellence in the design of engineered products and/or systems; 2) realization of conceptual modeling tools aimed at reducing design cycle time and ensuring maximum achievement of design goals for human use; 3) realization of an environment for economic and supply chain design optimization; 4) establishment of a critical mass of expertise focused on the development of an e-Design modeling and simulation software platform and virtual prototyping tools, as well as strategies for achieving simulation based acquisition.

The proposed effort will contribute significantly to the successful development and preparation of graduate and undergraduate students. Results of this research effort will be integrated into the educational curriculum to enrich the student learning experiences in design, modeling and simulation, decision analysis, rapid prototyping, manufacturing, and simulation based acquisition courses. Students associated with the Center for e-Design will receive exceptional career development opportunities, as well as training in the ethical conduct of research. The addition of Iowa State University to the Center contributes to the diversity of the Center, with the leadership team and 25% of participating faculty being women, typically underrepresented in engineering. The PI and other ISU faculty plan to continue their long history of recruiting women and minority graduate and undergraduate students. Research and educational findings will be disseminated nationally and have significant broader impact through industrial collaboration and technology transfer.