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1. Workshops for Building the Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering Education Community

   Gennert, M. ; Lotfi, N. ; Mynderse, J. ; Jethwani, M. ; Kapila, V. ( June 2020 , ASEE annual conference exposition proceedings)

   Intelligent Autonomous Systems, including Intelligent Manufacturing & Automation and Industry 4.0, have immense potential to improve human health, safety, and welfare. Engineering these systems requires an interdisciplinary knowledge of mechanical, electrical, computer, software, and systems engineering throughout the design and development process. Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering (MRE) is emerging as a discipline that can provide the broad inter-disciplinary technical and professional skill sets that are critical to fulfill the research and development needs for these advanced systems. Despite experiencing tremendous, dynamic growth, MRE lacks a settled-on and agreed-upon body-of-knowledge, leading to unmet needs for standardized curricula, courses, laboratory platforms, and accreditation criteria, resulting in missed career opportunities for individuals and missed economic opportunities for industry. There have been many educational efforts around MRE, including courses, minors, and degree programs, but they have not been well integrated or widely adopted, especially in USA. To enable MRE to coalesce as a distinct and identifiable engineering field, the authors conducted four workshops on the Future of Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering (FoMRE) education at the bachelor’s degree level. The overall goal of the workshops was to improve the quality of undergraduate MRE education and to ease the adoption of teaching materials to prepare graduatesmore »with a blend of theoretical knowledge and practical hands-on skills. To realize this goal, the specific objectives were to generate enthusiasm and a sense of community among current and future MRE educators, promote diversity and inclusivity within the MRE community, identify thought leaders, and seek feedback from the community to serve as a foundation for future activities. The workshops were intended to benefit a wide range of participants including educators currently teaching or developing programs in MRE, PhD students seeking academic careers in MRE, and industry professionals desiring to shape the future workforce. Workshop activities included short presentations on sample MRE programs, breakout sessions on specific topics, and open discussion sessions. As a result of these workshops, the MRE educational community has been enlarged and engaged, with members actively contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning. This paper presents the workshops’ formats, outcomes, results of participant surveys, and their analyses. A major outcome was identifying concept, skill, and experience inventories organized around the dimensions of foundational/practical/applications and student preparation/MRE knowledgebase. Particular attention is given to the extent to which the workshops realized the project goals, including attendee demographics, changes in participant attitudes, and development of the MRE community. The paper concludes with a summary of lessons learned and a call for future activities to shape the field.« less
2. Practical Skills for Students in Mechatronics and Robotics Education

   Berry, C. ; Gennert, M. ; Reck, R. ( June 2020 , ASEE annual conference exposition proceedings)

   In September 2019, the fourth and final workshop on the Future of Mechatronics and Robotics Education (FoMRE) was held at a Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, MI. This workshop was organized by faculty at several universities with financial support from industry partners and the National Science Foundation. The purpose of the workshops was to create a cohesive effort among mechatronics and robotics courses, minors and degree programs. Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering (MRE) is an integration of mechanics, controls, electronics, and software, which provides a unique opportunity for engineering students to function on multidisciplinary teams. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, it attracts diverse and innovative students, and graduates better-prepared professional engineers. In this fast growing field, there is a great need to standardize educational material and make MRE education more widely available and easier to adopt. This can only be accomplished if the community comes together to speak with one clear voice about not only the benefits, but also the best ways to teach it. These efforts would also aid in establishing more of these degree programs and integrating minors or majors into existing computer science, mechanical engineering, or electrical engineering departments. The final workshop was attended by approximately 50 practitionersmore »from industry and academia. Participants identified many practical skills required for students to succeed in an MRE curriculum and as practicing engineers after graduation. These skills were then organized into the following categories: professional, independent learning, controller design, numerical simulation and analysis, electronics, software development, and system design. For example, professional skills include technical reports, presentations, and documentation. Independent learning includes reading data sheets, performing internet searches, doing a literature review, and having a maker mindset. Numerical simulation skills include understanding data, presenting data graphically, solving and simulating in software such as MATLAB, Simulink and Excel. Controller design involves selecting a controller, tuning a controller, designing to meet specifications, and understanding when the results are good enough. Electronics skills include selecting sensors, interfacing sensors, interfacing actuators, creating printed circuit boards, wiring on a breadboard, soldering, installing drivers, using integrated circuits, and using microcontrollers. Software development of embedded systems includes agile program design, state machines, analyzing and evaluating code results, commenting code, troubleshooting, debugging, AI and machine learning. Finally, system design includes prototyping, creating CAD models, design for manufacturing, breaking a system down into subsystems, integrating and interfacing subcomponents, having a multidisciplinary perspective, robustness, evaluating tradeoffs, testing, validation, and verification, failure, effect, and mode analysis. A survey was prepared and sent out to the participants from all four workshops as well as other robotics faculty, researchers and industry personnel in order to elicit a broader community response. Because one of the biggest challenges in mechatronics and robotics education is the absence of standardized curricula, textbooks, platforms, syllabi, assignments, and learning outcomes, this was a vital part of the process to achieve some level of consensus. This paper presents an introduction to MRE education, related work on existing programs, methods, results of the practical skills survey, and then draws conclusions based upon these results. It aims to create the foundation for standardizing the development of student skills in mechatronics and robotics curricula across institutions, disciplines, majors and minors. The survey was completed by 94 participants and it was clear that there is a consensus that the primary skills students should have upon completion of MRE courses or a program is a broader multidisciplinary systems-level perspective, an ability to problem solve, and an ability to design a system to meet specifications.« less
3. Promoting Open-source Hardware and Software Platforms in Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering Education

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35107  

   Lotfi, N. ; Mbanisi, C. ; Auslander, D. ; Berry, C. ; Rodriguez, L. ; Molki, M. ( June 2020 , ASEE annual conference exposition proceedings)

   The evolution of Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering (MRE) has enabled numerous technological advancements since the early 20th century. Professionals in this field are reshaping the world by designing smart and autonomous systems aiming to improve human well-being. Recognizing the need for preparing highly-educated MRE professionals, many universities and colleges are adopting MRE as a distinct degree program. One of the cornerstones of MRE education is laboratory- and project-based learning to provide a hands-on and engaging experience for the students. To this end, numerous software and hardware platforms have been developed and utilized in MRE courses and laboratories. Commercial products can provide a rich hands-on experience for the students, but they can be cost-prohibitive. On the other hand, open-source platforms are low-cost alternatives to their commercial counterparts and are being increasingly used in industry. Developing open-source laboratory platforms will be a more feasible option for a wider range of institutions and would enable familiarizing the students with recent technological trends in industry and exposing them to the development details of a real-world system. However, adoption of open-source platforms in MRE courses can be lengthy and time consuming. Educators who wish to utilize such systems typically lack the expertise in all aspectsmore »of their implementation which can make them difficult to troubleshoot. Debugging open-source systems can also be challenging because most of the troubleshooting is done through forum discussions which appear to be very noisy and unfocused. The flip side of this chaotic nature of the open-source world is that there is a vast amount of information available, including tutorials, examples, and commentary and, with some focused searching, debugging and usage questions can often get answered. There is also a disconnect between the forum participants, typically computer scientists and hobbyists, and MRE educators and students. Finally, the available resources and documentation for utilizing open-source platforms in MRE education are insufficient and incomprehensive. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to increase awareness and familiarity with the use of open-source software and hardware packages in MRE education and practice towards accelerating their adoption. To this end, open-source software packages such as Python, GNU Octave, OpenFOAM, Java, Modelica, Gazebo, SPICE, Scilab, and Gnuplot, which have the potential to be useful in the modeling and analysis of MRE systems are introduced. Furthermore, low-cost and powerful open-source hardware packages such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and BeagleBone which can be used as the main processing unit for data acquisition and control implementation in a wide range of MRE systems are reviewed and their limitations and potentials are investigated. This paper provides a valuable resource for MRE students and faculty who would like to utilize open-source hardware and software platforms in their education and research.« less
4. Mechatronics and Robotics Education: Standardizing Foundational Key Concepts

   McFall, K. ; Huang, K. ; Gilbert, H. ; Jouaneh, M. ; Bai, H. ; Auslander, D. ( June 2020 , ASEE annual conference exposition proceedings)

   The field of Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering (MRE) is emerging as a distinct academic discipline. Previously, courses in this field have been housed in departments of Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Computer Science, instead of a standalone department or curriculum. More recently, single, freestanding courses have increasingly grown into course sequences and concentrations, with entire baccalaureate and graduate degree programs now being offered. The field has been legitimized in recent years with the National Center for Education Statistics creating the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) code 14.201 Mechatronics, Robotics, and Automation Engineering. As of October 2019, ABET accredits a total of 9 B.S. programs in the field: 5 Mechatronics Engineering, 3 Robotics Engineering, 1 Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering, and none in Automation Engineering. Despite recent tremendous and dynamic growth, MRE lacks a dedicated professional organization and has no discipline-specific ABET criteria. As the field grows more important and widespread, it becomes increasingly relevant to formalize and standardize the curricula of these programs. This paper begins a conversation about the contents of a cohesive concept inventory for MRE. The impetus for this effort grew from a set of four industry and government sponsored workshops held around the country named the Futuremore »of Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering (FoMRE). These workshops brought together multidisciplinary academic professionals and industry leaders in the field, and ran from September 2018 to September 2019. The study presented here focuses primarily on programs at the baccalaureate level, but informs discussion at the graduate level as well. A survey is prepared with lists of potential concept inventory items, and asks university faculty, students and practicing engineers to identify which concepts lie at the core of MRE. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field, a wide range of basic concepts including physical quantities and units, circuit analysis, digital logic, electronics, programming, computer-aided design, solid and fluid mechanics, chemistry, dynamic systems and controls, and mathematics are considered. Questions ask participants to rank the priority or importance of potential core concepts from these categories and also provide opportunities for open-ended response. The results of this survey identify gaps between existing undergraduate curricula, student experience, and employer expectations, and continuing work will provide insight into the direction of a unifying curricular design for MRE education.« less
5. A methodological approach for researching online teacher professional development

   Johnson, M. M. ( April 2021 , Middle Atlantic ASEE Section Spring 2021 Conference)

   COVID-19 has altered the landscape of teaching and learning. For those in in-service teacher education, workshops have been suspended causing programs to adapt their professional development to a virtual space to avoid indefinite postponement or cancellation. This paradigm shift in the way we conduct learning experiences creates several logistical and pedagogical challenges but also presents an important opportunity to conduct research about how learning happens in these new environments. This paper describes the approach we took to conduct research in a series of virtual workshops aimed at teaching rural elementary teachers about engineering practices and how to teach a unit from an engineering curriculum. Our work explores how engineering concepts and practices are socially constructed through interactions with teachers, students, and artifacts. This approach, called interactional ethnography has been used by the authors and others to learn about engineering teaching and learning in precollege classrooms. The approach relies on collecting data during instruction, such as video and audio recordings, interviews, and artifacts such as journal entries and photos of physical designs. Findings are triangulated by analyzing these data sources. This methodology was going to be applied in an in-person engineering education workshop for rural elementary teachers, however the pandemic forcedmore »us to conduct the workshops remotely. Teachers, working in pairs, were sent workshop supplies, and worked together during the training series that took place over Zoom over four days for four hours each session. The paper describes how we collected video and audio of teachers and the facilitators both in whole group and in breakout rooms. Class materials and submissions of photos and evaluations were managed using Google Classroom. Teachers took photos of their work and scanned written materials and submitted them all by email. Slide decks were shared by the users and their group responses were collected in real time. Workshop evaluations were collected after each meeting using Google Forms. Evaluation data suggest that the teachers were engaged by the experience, learned significantly about engineering concepts and the knowledge-producing practices of engineers, and feel confident about applying engineering activities in their classrooms. This methodology should be of interest to the membership for three distinct reasons. First, remote instruction is a reality in the near-term but will likely persist in some form. Although many of us prefer to teach in person, remote learning allows us to reach many more participants, including those living in remote and rural areas who cannot easily attend in-person sessions with engineering educators, so it benefits the field to learn how to teach effectively in this way. Second, it describes an emerging approach to engineering education research. Interactional ethnography has been applied in precollege classrooms, but this paper demonstrates how it can also be used in teacher professional development contexts. Third, based on our application of interactional ethnography to an education setting, readers will learn specifically about how to use online collaborative software and how to collect and organize data sources for research purposes.« less