For the past year, I've been developing the software and control architecture for drones as an Unmanned Systems Engineer at Quanser. When I started, I only had one concept down right - the mapping between the motors and the degrees...
What is an engineer? What does it mean to design? How do you build a robot? The students in my daughter’s kindergarten class can tell you! Derek and I visited her class last week to share our passion for engineering....
When I was a child, one of my favourite pass-times was to acquire a piece of electronic waste and take it apart into its component pieces. There is something fascinating about taking something complex like a computer or VCR and...
A couple of weeks ago, we invited a group of researchers from all across Canada to Quanser's Markham headquarters for a roundtable discussion on autonomous vehicles. While we gave them a sneak peek of our new (and by now already...
Over the past five decades, the engineering education community has explored and established effective techniques to teach design. In the emerging world of transformational technologies of IoT, sustainable energy, machine intelligence, etc., the question of whether the existing successes can...
There was a time when electronics and computers were cutting edge. Integrated circuits were only in the most high-end products, and the idea of having a computer of your very own was a futurist dream. In those days electrical and...
A visit to the Toronto Rehab Institute's Challenging Environment Assessment Laboratory (CEAL) is a special treat that comes with working at Quanser. I could hardly resist joining our software group when they decided to drop by and see how TRI's...
I could be wrong, but I don’t think that anyone really ever enjoyed slide shows. I realize that the 60s were a different time, and the options for entertainment were somewhat more limited than they are now, but I’m still...
Publishing simple, non-interactive content onto a mobile device isn’t very difficult. Writing a PowerPoint document, PDF document, Word document, or a Web page will usually suffice. Simplified, this process typically involves: Authoring content Distributing content (email, share, upload, etc.) However,...
It all started in my grade 12 physics classroom. The birthplace of my doubt. I was hanging on by a thin rope connecting my desire to innovate and my parents’ desire for me to become a neurosurgeon. I questioned the...
