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Partnership And Collaboration At The University Of Toronto
Objective:
Quanser and the University of Toronto work together to improve undergraduate/graduate labs and foster research.
"Control is ubiquitous - all engineers need to understand this!"
And so begins a lively lab tour with Prof. Manfredi Maggiore, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Manfredi is intensely proud of the work he and his colleagues - and students - have performed in the last few years. In researching and teaching various elements of control theory/application, Manfredi believes Quanser not only makes an excellent partner in terms of supplying physical courseware, they also make a superb collaborator for all aspects of control-based research.
Citing his new 3-DOF magnetic levitation project, he tells Quanser CEO Paul Gilbert:
"You are the only people with enough expertise to be willing and able to do this kind of project."
Quanser Solution:
Collaboration with the University of Toronto in securing funding for labs, expertise for custom experiments, while supplying expandable and cost-effective equipment for staff and students.
"We wanted to create a high-precision device that is capable of positioning an object placed on a moving platform in three degrees of freedom with high accuracy," he explains. "Magnetic levitation is an excellent technology because there is no contact, so there is no wear of components. It's also good for very high accuracy because if there's something that is magnetically levitated - and if motion is not transmitted mechanically - then you can reject vibrations coming from the environment."
Applications that benefit from this kind of research includes a vast range of industrial systems, including disk drive head assembly systems, probing and inspection equipment, photolithographic positioning stages (microsteppers) in semiconductor manufacturing, and many others.
With various research challenges in mind, Manfredi and three colleagues applied for a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), a federal government program mandated to strengthen the capacity of Canadian universities to carry out world-class research and technology development. Quanser was one of the industrial sponsors on this application.
"We got the grant and with these funds we basically built a graduate research lab from scratch," he says. The equipment included computers, several Quanser control experiments (Linear Position Servo using the Inverted Pendulum,
Coupled Tanks and a 3-DOF Helicopter) and perhaps most importantly, Manfredi and his colleagues received engineering hours to build two custom experiments: the magnetic levitation device and 10 wheeled robots.
"It was a two-way collaboration that was great for Quanser and it was great for us," he adds. "We recognize the fact that this was a partnership - a true research collaboration - and we have such a good relationship with Quanser."
Manfredi takes the time to show a wooden pen in his graduate lab that is the home of 10 Quanser-produced mobile robots, a key collaborative effort between Quanser and Prof. Mireille Broucke.
"There is a lot of interest in the academic community for applications where you want a co-ordination of robots in a de-centralized fashion," he explains. "So this means you want a fleet of robots to move in a nice harmonious way, sharing only local information, and if one of them breaks down or fails or loses communication, you would like the remaining robots to reconfigure and continue the task."
The Quanser robots were designed with robustness, reconfiguration and data translation in mind, in order to address the hostile environments that could benefit from this technology.
"The question is how do you come up with rigorous algorithms that guarantee that these properties are achieved?" he asks. "Mireille Broucke, Bruce Francis and myself are doing theoretical research to answer such fundamental questions. Some of our findings have been successfully tested on the experimental platform developed by Quanser, and more validation will be made in the near future."
And finally, no tour of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department would be complete without a visit to the new undergraduate lab. Here, in a well-lit room with perhaps one of the most scenic views of the campus, you'll find approximately 80 workstations, some of which are outfitted with Quanser data acquisition boards.
"It's a wonderful lab - it's in a new building - all these huge windows!" he beams. "It's a very nice environment for students."
In terms of undergraduate students' needs, Manfredi says the university offers a "basic" third-year course and two "advanced" fourth-year courses. His favourite teaching tool for these courses is the Quanser Inverted Pendulum experiment, which was initially purchased for the fourth-year course.
"We originally decided to buy the pendulum because it is an exciting experiment for students," he notes. "There's some work needed to calculate (its parameters) and a computer can balance a pendulum better than a human. So it's an experiment that's inherently challenging to control."
After utilizing the pendulum for a while, he discovered the experiment could be scaled back and used to introduce control concepts, so it became appropriate for third-year students as well. (In the basic control course, students control just the position of the cart, an easier problem to solve than balancing the pendulum, which is an assignment for fourth-year students to address.)
Did Manfredi ever consider building and designing these experiments himself?
Yes, but he declined for reasons including (a) too many engineering hours would be required (b) "you need someone with experience in this sort of thing" and (c) he was concerned about robustness and durability, since some students can be quite careless with lab equipment.
"If something breaks down, and it's made by Quanser, we can get it fixed fast," Manfredi says. "But if it's custom made by us, and the builder's not around, then you have to find someone else with the same skillset to repair it." He quickly adds he's never had a serious problem with Quanser products.
Besides, the products he's purchased can be used by multiple courses and different levels, whether it's being utilized by Electrical and Computer Engineering students or Engineering Sciences students. And this is where Quanser's supplied curriculum comes into play, which is designed to provide a basic foundation for control theory.
"The other good thing about the curriculum is that it's so easy to modify," he says. "Once you have all the basic things like mathematical models and parameters of the system, then adapting them and customizing them to your needs becomes all very easy. It's basically cut and paste."
And with that, Manfredi smiles, bids good day and makes his way back to his office. His parting words sum up the Quanser-University of Toronto relationship:
"We work together, we publish papers together … there is always a continuous interchange of good ideas." |
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Prof. Manfredi Maggiore |
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University of Toronto Control Lab |
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Teaching controls via Quanser's
Inverted Pendulum experiment. |
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Manfredi's 3-DOF magnetic
levitation project |
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The pen for the wheeled robots |
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