When UTIAS Professor Reza Emami began teaching a new AER525 Robotics course recently, he had a problem: No robots.
At first, Emami and his students had to make do with rudimentary simulations. Eventually he managed to procure a few tabletop robots. However, these were too simple to allow him to demonstrate all aspects of industrial robotics. But buying enough examples of each type of robot taught in the course so that all the students would have a chance to work with them would have been prohibitively expensive.
So Emami and his team developed a reconfigurable robot manipulator and an Integrated Design and Simulation Environment (IDSE) using MATLAB and Simulink, software programs developed by Mathworks Inc. The robot manipulator will allow students in the course to design, simulate, optimize and operate most configurations of robot manipulators used in industry today, Emami said.
“Our students now have a reconfigurable platform that enables them to explore the various robot configurations they are likely to encounter in industry. They are learning to design optimized robots for a given task, which would be impossible if they were working with only one type of robot manipulator with a fixed configuration.”
Mathworks is now featuring Emami’s innovative solution on its website. More information on how he did it can be found here.
