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Externship Summary - 2007

Curriculum Project

Externship RCNGM Leader:  Ismail Orabi, University of New Haven

Externship:  Covidien

Lessons Learned

The most useful learning component of my externship was to develop a collaboration with the engineering staff at Covidien, the world's largest manufacturer and distributor of medical products.  I had an opportunity to learn about the efforts of a large, complex manufacturing company to define the skills its employees need, track their proficiency in these skills and setup training programs to improve proficiency in these skills.  I was given the opportunity to visit different departments and observe associated tasks which involved medical products technology. One area of special importance was spending time in the fully automated manufacturing department where a complete check of system and operational performance occured.

The most challenging component was working on a project to compute near-optimal motions for autonomous robotic vehicles and producing results in such a short time.

The full implementation of my project is still under way.  Students will learn how to use a variety of graphical representations that greatly facilitate the solution of dynamics problems, including free-body diagrams, kinetic diagrams, and vector polygons.  Students will learn how to use computational tools to solve dynamics problems.

Covidien gave students a few projects that would allow them to redesign and improve an existing system of the automation process.  We are planning to invite a manufacturing engineer from Covidien to come into the classroom to explain the project.  I adapted my lessons so that I could use real world problems instead of the standard text book problems. 

Impact on Student Learning

The result of the externship and curriculum has impacted my students in a very positive way.  It has increased depth of knowledge, and made me a more effective teacher.  Students are very interested in the project.  In the project, a two-phase approach was adopted, where a randomized planner produces a sequence of motion trajectories of montonically decreasing cost.  In a second phase, the best motion computed by optimized procedure, based on user-defined criteria.  This problem was forumulated as an optimal control problem and an optimization algorithm were used to solve it numerically.

Externship Sustainability

I have described my experience and shared what I learned on my externship with other professors and students.  It is very important to connect the engineering curriculum to the real world work environment.  Tt provides depth to the lectures and makes the course more interesting, appealing and relevant to the students.  The benefits of my externships are shared with the students and colleagues.  The students were very pleased to have actual examples of local company projects that could be shared with the first year students.  I was able to illustrate to the students actual results from manufacturing projects that directly related to the course curriculum. 

 

 

 

 

 


The Regional Center for Next Generation Manufacturing is funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation Advanced Technology Education program. Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.