Computer Aided Prototyping

We are very interested in building systems that require a heavy interdisciplinary interaction between a number of engineering disciplines. The national needs in robotics, automation, manufacturing, and intelligent systems are pushing scientists and engineers to learn more about different disciplines to be able to build coherent systems. Using computers to build platforms and environments for various prototyping activities in those fields is becoming a necessity. The end product of research of this highly interdisciplinary nature would be:

• Prototyping environments (software and hardware) that allow the concurrent design of engineering systems (manipulators, mobile robots, electromechanical structures, MEMS, operating systems and schedulers for manufacturing applications).
• Actual tools, hardware and software systems, and machines. The end applications of the developed environments and platforms can range >from real-time distributed operating systems for specialized machines and electromechanical equipments, to mobile robots for specific tasks, to micro-nano sensors, actuators, and manipulators, to real-time visualizations of biological entities under outer space constraints, to process plans for manufacturing under tolerance requirements.

The interdisciplinary nature of the computer-aided prototyping research provides exciting opportunities to develop new and efficient algorithms and strategies for coordinating the efforts of the different groups involved. We believe that graduating engineers, especially in the fields of computer science and engineering, and electrical engineering should have much more interdisciplinary knowledge about other engineering, physics, and mathematics areas than what they currently have, on the average. The interdisciplinary nature of our research provides an exceptional educational environment for those involved in the work. Our practice is to insure that each research associate is aware of and contributes to all aspects of the big project, not just the individual research problem he or she is working on at the time. The intention is to produce graduates with a depth and breadth of experience which makes them especially well qualified to tackle demanding problems in science and engineering.

The United States is experiencing a major economic battle in the global market place. The main justification for research of this nature is that a success will put us in a better competitive position vis-a-vis the rest of the world. If the approach to computer-aided prototyping and its use to solve reliably, efficiently, modularly, and rapidly a number of problems within electromechanical and physical systems design and modeling, real-time software and hardware controllers, monitors, and observers succeeds; then we stand to significantly impact prototyping, automation and manufacturing.

The CISE robot prototyping environment project resulted in a concurrent and flexible design environment for prototyping robots , in addition to the ``URK'' (Utah Robot Kit) robot. In the Hybrid Systems Control Project, we are working to develop a graphical DES (Discrete Event System) hybrid controller, simulator, and analysis framework. The framework allows for the control, simulation and monitoring of dynamic systems that exhibits a combination of symbolic, continuous, discrete, and chaotic behaviors, and includes stochastic timing descriptions, probabilistic transitions, controllability and observability definitions, temporal, timed, state space, petri-nets, and recursive representations, analysis, and synthesis algorithms.

Major CISE and CISE-related Projects:

• The Utah Robot Kit (URK) and the Utah Prototyping Environment (UPE).
• Concurrent Design and Manufacturing.
• Unifying Tolerances Across Sensing, Design, and Manufacturing.
• Sensing for Advanced Manufacturing and Reverse Engineering.
• Discrete Event and Hybrid Systems in Robotics and Automation.
• Discrete Event Dynamic Systems Technical Committee (DEDS TC) of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.