Reseach Equipment Grant: Laboratory Equipment - VERAM: A Virtual Environment for Education, Robotics, Automation and Manufacturing

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9610055 Ramaswamy This award provides funding for the purchase of equipment necessary for research into the development of virtual environments for manufacturing applications and investigating the use of robotic manipulators as applied to assembly operations. An immersive virtual environment will be worthwhile in training new employees in interacting with the virtual shop floor resources (current examples in this regard include flight simulators). It can be used to study employee reflexes to frequently occurring shop floor situations or exceptional situations (failures, etc.) that are rare in occurrence and thereby help in the placement (or job rotation) of these employees in appropriate environments. Results obtained from such an exercise may also help to develop better human computer interfacing techniques based on advances in multi-media. Results from implementing such virtual environments can be used to judge non-logical issues such as fatigue and efficiency of employees over time to shop floor situations thereby becoming an important issue in making the shop floor safer for our work force. If successful, the results from this research can also be used successfully in studying multi-media enhanced instructional schemes. Although it has been consistently said that multi-media enhanced instructional schemes are very effective in student education, research into the effect of these techniques with respect to learning theories, strategies, visual and aural metaphors, and the effects of collaborated vs. situated learning mechanisms is nascent. Virtual reality in instruction may provide major insights into issues such as: focusing student attention, improving memory retention, interleaving visual and aural interfaces to maximize the learning process and improving interaction mechanisms, etc. Thus this work may also contribute in understanding the possible limitations of multi-media techniques in instruction.