CI-TEAM: Exploiting Cyber-Infrastructure for Creation and Use of Multi-Disciplinary Engineering Models

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This CI-Team demonstration will create a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary, engineering model to support in-silico prototyping of snake-inspired robotic systems. Snake-inspired robots have many potential applications, including those in medicine, civil engineering, search and rescue, and homeland security. This model will be created during a coordinated set of multi-disciplinary classes developed by the PIs and concurrently taught across the partner institutions and accessible via distance learning systems. The CI-Team plans an ambitious use of cyber-collaboration and education technologies to prototype a set of core courses in a curriculum for "Engineering Informatics" that spans our institutions and unites computer and information sciences with traditional engineering domains.The team is a highly inter-disciplinary group from four universities consisting of computer scientists and engineers with the complimentary expertise needed to create both the shared model and the educational deliverables. The scientific challenge to the team is to produce an engineering model that integrates semantic descriptions of robotic components, behavioral and simulation software, software for snake robot control and navigation, as well as the tools needed to perform analysis, component surrogation and mission assessment. The educational challenge is to develop course materials that are both multi-disciplinary and scientifically rich. The goal is to educate students so they can span and integrate disciplines: semantics, engineering modeling, and computational tools. This project will deeply connect different sub-fields of engineering and computer science, enabling the new inter-disciplinary trained engineers to rapidly create new snake-inspired robot designs. BROADER IMPACTS: This project contributes to the transformation of engineering into an "informatics" discipline and broadens the interface between computer science and engineering. The CI-Team aims to establish the content of an "Engineering Informatics" curriculum around the snake robot domain and use it as a basis for integrating fundamental concepts from engineering and computer science. Further, the technical results contained in the engineering model will support two areas of major national need. First, it advances the state of the art in snake-inspired robotic systems and produces a repository for use by educators and researchers. Second, through active collaboration with partners at NIST and DOE, the team will transition concepts into ongoing standards efforts sponsored by ISO and the W3C. Finally, the development of the Engineering Informatics discipline will contribute to a cyberinfrastructure-savvy workforce and by integrating the results of this demonstration project with on-going efforts for broadened participation will also create a diverse cyberinfrastructure workforce and user community.