Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Taşcıoğlu Y. (Yürütücü)
Yükseköğretim Kurumları Destekli Proje, 2022 - 2024
About 20 years ago the only way for a student to access internet on campus was a computer laboratory. This was the case even when a student had a laptop (which was very rare), because the internet was not portable. With the availability of wireless internet, computer laboratories became a thing of the past. During Covid lockdowns, we were able to conduct lectures, complete assignments and communicate course material comfortably over the internet. The biggest negative impact of the lockdowns was on hands-on learning, laboratories. The overall objective of the project is to develop a fully open-source experiment kit, TEDUPaddle, for hands-on learning in dynamics, control and haptics for less than 50 $/kit including all necessary software components. TEDUPaddle will be built, programmed, used and modified by students themselves anytime and anywhere. This project is a continuation of the haptic paddle project, which started at Stanford University in late 1990s. Mechanical structure of the original haptic paddle was built from laser-cut acrylic and used a relatively low-cost motor and sensors. On the other hand, several thousand dollars worth of laboratory equipment was used to controlthe system. The design was open-source but it was out of reach for people who do not have access to a fully equiped laboratory. Nonetheless it was a big improvement from conventional closed-architecture experiment setups, so it inspired a lot of researchers from different universities. This inspiration resulted in second generation paddles, which replaced the state-of-the-art electronics with more accessable microcontrollers such as Arduino. The second generation paddles also benefited from 3D printing, which enabled them to be built, programmed and used as standalone devices by anyone, anywhere. The paddles are shown to be a good teaching tool especially due to their ability to simulate physical phenomenon such as inertia, stiffness, friction, viscous effects. Our main contribution is to develop a virtual interactive environment at the computer side by using Python, which is open-source and freely available to anyone. This environment will include a digital-twin of the TEDUPaddle and also some virtual mechanical systems for synchronized interaction with the physical device. Another contribution is to port the microcontroller software to Python so that a single programming languageis used for the entire system. In the final phase of the project we will design incremental laboratory sessions for the TEDUPaddle, in which the students will be required to build, calibrate, program, identify, control and use the device. This sequence can be introduced entirely into fourth year Mechatronics, System Dynamics and Haptics elective courses, or partly into third year Control Systems and Theory of Machines core courses. Student learning will be assessed based on the techniques reported in literature for similar studies