2000 — 2004 |
Colgate, J. Edward Peshkin, Michael [⬀] Stewart, Paul (co-PI) [⬀] Buttolo, Pietro |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Goali: Haptic Cobots @ Northwestern University
We propose research underlying the use of cobots for haptic display of solid models. The project brings together CAD graphics/haptics researchers at Ford Motor Company with haptics/cobot researchers at Northwestern University. A recently completed 3R haptic cobot will be the experimental testbed for the project.
Large-scale haptic display opens up new opportunities, because people interact with large objects (arm size or larger) in a very different way from that in which they interact with small objects (hand size or smaller). An example is the current use of full-size "clay bucks" in automobile design. A sense of the feel and sweep of an automobile body panels cannot be obtained by touching a scale model of it with a finger, as current haptic displays permit. However a full sized virtual model experienced through the proprioception of whole arm motion, in conjunction with the excellent CAD graphics now available, could bring virtual prototyping and surface editing to a new level of utility.
Cobot control for haptics differs markedly from robot control for haptics, because cobots use servo-steered rolling mechanisms, rather than servomotor actuators, to create virtual surfaces. The project addresses (1) development of a control methodology for the new power-injection architecture of the 3R cobot. (2) finding cobot-appropriate algorithms for haptic surface rendering directly from NURBS descriptions of surfaces. (3) deriving control laws for dynamic behaviors beyond hard surfaces, including compliant and viscous effects, inertia masking, and artificial potentials (4) finding algorithms for solid-model collision detection which allow the collision to be predicted and rendered by the cobot without exceeding its dynamic limits.
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1.009 |
2008 — 2010 |
Mckenna, Ann Norman, Donald Colgate, J. Edward Chen, Wei |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research - Nsf Workshop Series: Interdisciplinary Design as An Instructional Discipline @ Northwestern University
This grant provides funding to conduct a series of workshops on Interdisciplinary Design as an Instructional Discipline to be held over a 12 month period. Workshops will be held at the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and in conjunction with the 2009 NSF CMII Grantees Conference and the 2009 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences. These workshops will address issues related to supporting the emerging discipline of design through graduate education and interdisciplinary design research. Participants from a broad range of disciplines, including engineering, architecture, industrial design, visual arts, psychology, and business, among others, will be invited to attend.
Design is an integrative activity that spans many disciplines; however, our educational system often struggles to provide interdisciplinary design experiences for our undergraduate and graduate students and to recognize the significance of design research. Recently, new and innovative interdisciplinary graduate programs in design have arisen with strong ties to engineering yet structured to fully embrace and complement research from other disciplines. These graduate programs have the potential to influence the development of a new discipline of design that includes both education and research. Interdisciplinary education is a central factor in expanding and sustaining an American competitive advantage in today's global economy. Developing design as a broadly recognized and practiced instructional discipline is essential for maintaining leadership in the innovation of new products and systems. This series of workshops will bring together experts in the field of engineering design research and education and the larger design community to explore the challenges, successes, practices and future directions of interdisciplinary design graduate programs to gain insight into how to construct, grow, and sustain programs that prepare students for successful design innovation. If successful, this series of workshops will form the basis of new approaches to design education and research that fully embraces interdisciplinary collaborations within the current structure of academia.
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1.009 |
2010 — 2012 |
Colgate, J. Edward Chen, Wei Gilbert, Jeremy (co-PI) [⬀] Gerber, Elizabeth |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Workshop: Driving Innovation Through Design - Engineering in the 21st Century; Held At Northwestern University, April 15-16, 2010 @ Northwestern University
The objective of this grant is to conduct a workshop that will bring together a group of university administrators (Deans/department heads), faculty and researchers, and industrial practitioners, across a variety of disciplines such as engineering, business, economics, journalism, arts and architecture, education and social policy, to hold a substantive discussion of the role that Design may have in helping universities achieve their mission in the twenty-first century. The goals of this workshop are: (1) to reach a deeper understanding of the transdisciplinary issues faced in engineering education and the world of design; (2) to foster interactions and facilitate dialogue between university administrators and design faculty and researchers by collectively sharing experiences of creating, cultivating, and sustaining successful interdisciplinary research and education programs; and (3) to seek synergistic research and educational efforts towards establishing Design as a path towards innovation and transdisciplinary cross-connection.
Improving the creativity and innovativeness of U.S. students is a mandate for national competitiveness and social well-being, which calls for innovative changes to the current university system. If successful, this workshop will define directions for research in design that help inform education as well as practice. It will also contribute to breakthroughs in understanding the challenges that universities face in responding to an ever-more complex and interconnected world. The workshop will create an open and productive dialogue among the many different disciplines involved in design. By inviting the university administrators, the workshop will generate effective dialogues to gain rich information and insights about establishing new interdisciplinary programs within a university setting.
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1.009 |
2021 — 2024 |
Colgate, J. Edward |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research: Hcc: Medium: Touchbots For Surface Haptics @ Northwestern University
This project will lead to a new class of human-machine interfaces that provide tactile feedback to fingertips. Fingertips are remarkable multimodal sensors capable of detecting pressure and vibration, local deformation such as braille cells, hardness/softness, warmth/coolness, and endless types of textures. There are strong reasons to exploit these sensory capabilities in interfaces: making touch screens more accessible for the vision impaired, making it easier to use touch interfaces in automobiles, providing touch feedback in augmented and virtual reality, and supporting remote touch in social, medical and retail applications. The wealth of commercially important use cases has led to a fast-growing market for touch feedback (“haptic”) technologies, yet none of the existing approaches engages more than a small fraction of the fingertips’ capabilities. The new interfaces to be developed – TouchBots – will provide a greatly expanded suite of haptic feedback modalities. A TouchBot is a miniaturized module that is placed between a fingertip and a touch surface, such as a touchscreen or trackpad. It includes two main subsystems: one that guides the finger along a programmable path, and another that provides a sense of the shape and texture of objects along that path. Together, these subsystems will enable TouchBots to offer many new haptic interactions such as touch-typing interfaces without keyboards, realistic surface textures for virtual reality, and fully programmable braille and tactile graphics anywhere there is a touch surface. These interactions have the potential to make touch screen devices accessible to the vision impaired. Recognizing that a new generation of technological innovators will be needed to commercialize the fruits of this research, close ties will be forged to graduate-level curricula in innovation, leading to impact-minded individuals who are well-positioned to provide leadership in the growing haptics industry.
The capabilities of a TouchBot stem from the manner in which it interacts with the underlying surface. The proposed TouchBot design includes: (a) kinesthetic subsystem that provides feedback via passively rolling, but actively steered, wheels; (b) a cutaneous module that provides feedback via an array of tiny "pucks"; (c) selective brake mechanism for each of these pucks using electroadhesion. This approach, known as “cobotic,” has been thoroughly developed for macro-scale devices, and will be adapted here to the meso-scale by careful integration of steering actuation, wheel design, and intent sensing. Touch-bot will be extremely compact, with a low-power, and high-performance system for motion guidance. The ability of the TouchBot to provide local shape and texture will be provided by an array of tiny “pucks,” using the selective breaking mechanism. This research will leverage prior efforts in areas as diverse as surface haptics, wall-climbing robots and data storage read-write heads to realize an electro-adhesive device that is high-force and high-bandwidth and that can be used to control a high-density tactile array. By bringing these technologies together into fingertip-scale devices, it will be possible to demonstrate a wide range of surface haptic interactions including buttons, toggles, raised line drawings, braille characters, tactile graphics, and textures. Participatory design methods will be used to identify potential uses of TouchBot in the areas such as automotive and user interaction design. Experience prototype and rapid iteration will be used to create stimuli that evoke rich feedback.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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1.009 |
2022 — 2026 |
Colgate, J. Edward Elwin, Matthew |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research: Nri: Shape-Based Remote Manipulation @ Northwestern University
Remote presence systems, consisting of operator interfaces coupled to avatar robots, promise new ways of connecting people across the barrier of distance. For example, the technology will enable physicians to incorporate physical examinations into telehealth, and families to care for elderly relatives as they age in place. Present systems, however, can be slow and frustrating to use due to limited haptic capabilities: operators cannot easily feel remote objects as if they were in their own hands. To address this, a new paradigm in telemanipulation, Shape-Based Remote Manipulation (SBRM), will be developed. SBRM integrates novel multi-finger haptic devices with mathematical models of grasped objects to enable dexterous in-hand telemanipulation. In addition to developing novel technology, this project will also make an educational impact both within and outside the partner universities. The investigators will recruit and train a majority BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) group of graduate students on this research. Additionally, the research team will design and host a tele-touch exhibit to be called “The Shape Beaming Experience” where students at The Challenger Learning Center in Tallahassee, Florida, can physically interact with students at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois.<br/><br/>The goal of Shape-Based Remote Manipulation (SBRM) is to overcome a fundamental issue in telemanipulation, namely the trade-off between stability/robustness and performance in the face of communication latencies. It accomplishes this through a novel integration of RGB-D data, geometric models, compliant robotic hands and arms, and bilateral control, along with innovations in multi-finger haptic feedback and shape-based controls. The project will be executed in four parts. First, a state-of-the-art remote manipulation testbed will be developed spanning two university campuses nearly 1,000 miles apart. Second, techniques for obtaining semantic, geometric, and physical information about objects in the avatar's environment will be developed. Third, a novel Shape Interface will be created, allowing operators to grasp, feel and manipulate virtual objects. Fourth, a set of shape-based control techniques that coordinate operator and avatar dexterity will be developed. The project will lead to new knowledge about the factors impacting remote in-hand dexterity, especially the role of shape-based haptic information. One aspect of the work will be a novel multi-finger haptic interface that constrains the fingers to extremely rigid virtual surfaces, enabling heretofore infeasible studies of shape information in haptic perception and dexterous manipulation. Another aspect of the work will be a new approach to telemanipulation based on differential geometry that aims to combine the robustness benefits of unilateral control with the performance benefits of bilateral control.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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1.009 |