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Ac 2007-2534: Mechatronics and Systems Instruction across Graduate, Undergraduate, and Research Applications Using Rapidly Reconfigurable Hardware
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Brennan, Sean |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | A challenge with the development of any new laboratory is the cost-effective use of hardware resources. This work discusses the development of a reconfigurable data-acquisition architecture across three different application areas in university mechatronics and control systems instruction setting: undergraduate education, graduate education, and graduate-level research. An analysis is offered of the different operational and educational requirements across these different levels of instruction. In many cases, these educational tiers present non-complementary requirements including different expectations on ease of use, durability, compatibility, software complexity, and performance. This work presents a laboratory development strategy that assists in balancing research and teaching while simultaneously fostering new activity in both areas. Introduction When faced with developing laboratory or research hardware across undergraduate, graduate, and research level applications, the historical solution at many educational institutes is simply to purchase and support distinctly different hardware data-acquisition solutions between the three separate areas. Not only is this expensive and unduly time consuming, but also it artificially breaks a natural continuum of instrumentation education across levels of instruction. There are several means to address the issue of limited time and resources. The simplest is to limit student exposure to hardware, and sadly this is an approach widely used. To counter this budget-centric focus, educators have long anecdotally claimed that interactive laboratory experiments and problem-based learning (PBL) foster a stronger education. Fortunately, there are very comprehensive studies in the recent literature that unquestionably validate problembased learning and leave no doubt that hands-on interaction is essential to efficient learning. Another way to provide student exposure to hardware is to seek out low-cost “trainer” type experimental systems. Examples of these abound in the literature, and while these are useful for primarily undergraduate education, their applicability to graduate education and research is clearly limited. Another option is to purchase or develop a few research-grade systems and allow controlled student access to these devices. While this method is also commonly used, it is generally unclear how well such systems scale in number or durability to situations where hundreds of students or more utilize the equipment. Yet another option is to pool resources across departments to form a lab facility with sufficient support to hire a controls lab developer that assists with research deployment. This very unique and successful approach requires interdepartmental coordination at a level beyond the feasible effort level of an individual faculty member, especially one just starting at a new institution. P ge 12051.2 This article presents a methodology employed at Penn State University starting in 2004 and continuing to the present employed to integrate research, graduate education, and undergraduate education. The situation at the start of the project was that the author, as a new faculty hire, was faced with the simultaneous challenge of developing a research instrumentation platform, a graduate Mechatronics course, and a controls laboratory suitable for undergraduate system theory and control. Nearly all new faculty are faced with a similar challenge and situation, albeit with different subject material. It is therefore it is hoped that the insights offered in this article provide some guidance for long-term integrative planning of research and teaching across disciplines. To summarize and illustrate the synergistic integration of this article, the uses of the hardware and software involved are generalized at each of the levels education in Fig. 1. This figure also provides a quick reference for the remainder of the article on how the same core equipment, in this case a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) is reconfigured for each educational purpose. For reasons justified shortly, the hardware platform chosen for cross-platform integration was the TMS320C6713 DSP by Texas Instruments mounted on a developer’s kit (DSK) component board manufactured by Spectrum Digital. The processor operates at 225 MHz with many key mathematical operations occurring in a single processor cycle. This specific processor was particularly attractive because of its extremely low cost including donations and greatly reduced pricing. Yet the system offers extremely high performance in floating point operations and memory access that support research-grade data-acquisition. This synergistic usage of equipment across research and teaching has led to a number of insights and “lessons learned” that are conveyed anecdotally in this paper whose remainder is organized as follows: First, a discussion is presented of the capability requirements of research-grade, graduate, and undergraduate data-acquisition equipment focusing on the conflicting and A n n u a l # o f s tu d e n ts u s in g e q u ip m e n t Examples Research Graduate Education Undergraduate Education |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.mne.psu.edu/toboldlygo/Publications/Conferences/2007_Brennan_MechatronicsAndSystemsInstructionAcrossGraduateUndergraduateAndResearchApplicationsUsingRapidlyReconfigurableHardware.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://controlfreaks.mne.psu.edu/Publications/Conferences/2007_Brennan_MechatronicsAndSystemsInstructionAcrossGraduateUndergraduateAndResearchApplicationsUsingRapidlyReconfigurableHardware.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.icee.usm.edu/ICEE/conferences/asee2007/papers/2534_MECHATRONICS_AND_SYSTEMS_INSTRUCTION_ACR.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://peer.asee.org/mechatronics-and-systems-instruction-across-graduate-undergraduate-and-research-applications-using-rapidly-reconfigurable-hardware.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
