Thursday, December 15, 2005

News from NI Just when I was thinking that the end of December would be a slow news month, I just heard from National Instruments. Remember when there were several competing PC operating systems? Remember several competing office applications? Well, NI has released additional tools for Linux including data acquisition and instrument drivers. Ever a proponent of education and support for students, NI has championed Lego Mindstorms along with programs to involve young people in science and engineering. Nearly 30 student teams created robots to explore the ocean depths for the second annual Central Texas FIRST LEGO League Tournament on Dec. 10. National Instruments, the NI Foundation, Kealing Middle School and the Austin Independent School District teamed up to bring this competition to Austin, where students, ages 9 to 14, were asked to create robots designed to help clean-up the ocean using LEGO Mindstorms and RoboLab programming software based on NI LabView. This is a good program for us all to emulate. 8:44:36 PM    comment []

More details on IMS meeting Jay Lee's tireless evangelistic efforts and promising results of intense academic research resulted in the gathering of approximately 150 engineers and researchers to the Conference Center at Toyota Motor Manufacturing in Georgetown, Ky. This was at least 50 percent larger attendance than the last meeting in May in Ann Arbor. The occasion was the Tenth Industry Advisory Board meeting of the Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems where Lee is director. Lee is not only Director of the Center but he is also a professor of engineering at the University of Cincinnati. This cooperative research center includes faculty and students not only from UC, staff from the University of Michigan and University of Missouri - Rolla also participate. Staff from other universities were in attendance to determine if they should also join. Toyota maintained the largest end user visibility in the research, but General Motors and Boeing were also involved. Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation has had long time interest in the Center. Automated Precision, DaimlerChrysler, ETAS, Ford, Montronix, Harley-Davidson, TechSolve, Komatsu, Mitsubishi Heavy Industry, PMC, Omron, Siemens (Germany), United Technology, Tongtai Machine Tool are all company members. Advantech Automation of Cincinnati added its name to the membership rolls at the conclusion of these meetings. Sponsor companies include National Instruments, Sensor Synergy, Cincinnati Lamb, Rexnord, Eagle Technology, Xerox, Cognex, iconics and Kistler. Joint academic and industry research has led to the development of a Watchdog Agent. This is a set of tools that can be used for various types of sensor and machine diagnostics. Developed in MatLab, it is being ported to C so that it can be embedded in devices and become commercially usable. Researchers reported results and projected new research in various areas of condition monitoring and diagnostics. Typical of the research were papers on "Network Health Monitoring," "Sensor Performance Degradation Assessment," "Quality Function Deployment based Watchdog Agent Tool Selection" and "Watchdog Agent Hardware Platform." Future research includes projects on a tool for anomaly detection, air compressor bearing prognostics, surge modeling and control for centrifugal compressors and robot health assessment and prognostics. 1:00:42 PM    comment []