Engineering

Robotics assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) is becoming increasingly more common for many surgical procedures. These minimally invasive techniques offer the benefit of reduced patient recovery time, mortality and scarring compared to traditional open surgery. Teleoperated procedures have the added advantage of increased visualization, and enhanced accuracy for the surgeon through tremor filtering and scaling down hand motions. There are however still limitations in these techniques preventing the widespread growth of the technology. In RAMIS, the surgeon is limited in their movement by the operating console or master device, and the cost of robotic surgery is often too high to justify for many procedures. Sterilization issues arise as well, as the surgeon must be in contact with the master device, preventing a smooth transition between traditional and robotic modes of surgery. This thesis outlines the design and analysis of a novel method of interaction with the da Vinci Su...

Robotics assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) is becoming increasingly more common for many surgical procedures. These minimally invasive techniques offer the benefit of reduced patient recovery time, mortality and scarring compared to traditional open surgery. Teleoperated procedures have the added advantage of increased visualization, and enhanced accuracy for the surgeon through tremor filtering and scaling down hand motions. There are however still limitations in these techniques preventing the widespread growth of the technology. In RAMIS, the surgeon is limited in their movement by the operating console or master device, and the cost of robotic surgery is often too high to justify for many procedures. Sterilization issues arise as well, as the surgeon must be in contact with the master device, preventing a smooth transition between traditional and robotic modes of surgery. This thesis outlines the design and analysis of a novel method of interaction with the da Vinci Surgical Robot. Using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), an open source research platform for the da Vinci robot, an interface was developed for controlling the robotic arms with the Leap Motion Controller. This small device uses infrared LEDs and two cameras to detect the 3D positions of the hand and fingers. This data from the hands are mapped to the da Vinci surgical tools in real time, providing the surgeon with an intuitive method of controlling the instruments. An analysis of the tracking workspace is provided, to give a solution to occlusion issues. Multiple sensors are fused together in order to increase the range of trackable motion over a single sensor. Additional work involves replacing the current viewing screen with a virtual reality (VR) headset (Oculus Rift), to provide the surgeon with a stereoscopic 3D view of the surgical site without the need for a large monitor. The headset also provides the user with a more intuitive and natural method of positioning the camera during surgery, using the natural motions of the head. The large master console of the da Vinci system has been replaced with an inexpensive vision based tracking system, and VR headset, allowing the surgeon to operate the da Vinci Surgical Robot with more natural movements for the user. A preliminary evaluation of the system is provided, with recommendations for future work. i First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr. Ana Luisa Trejos and Dr. Rajni Patel, for their continued guidance and support throughout my graduate studies and thesis project. Each has played a critical role in the development of this work, and have kept me on track throughout.

Finite element modelling of three dimensional elasticity problems gives rise to large sparse matrices. Various preconditioning methods are developed for use in preconditioned conjugate gradient iterative solution techniques. Incomplete factorizations based on levels of fill, drop tolerance, and a two level hierarchical basis are developed. Various techniques for ensuring that the incomplete factors have positive pivots are presented. Computational tests are carried out for problems generated using unstructured tetrahedral meshes. Quadratic basis functions are used. The performance of the iterative methods is compared to a standard direct sparse matrix solver. Problems with up to 70,000 degrees of freedom, and small (1) element aspect ratio are considered.

The most common metric used today to evaluate the effectiveness of a packing technique is the percentage of space used. An inherent limitation of this metric is its inability to differentiate between two different packing arrangements of the same set of objects. This paper proposes an alternative metric for both the 2D and 3D cases, called the point moment metric, and expands on the theory behind the proposed metric. The metric is based on evaluating the compactness of the remaining free space in a packing arrangement. This measure is the ratio of a defined moment calculated for the current free space and the initial free packing space. The developed metric can be extended to Ndimensional packing problems where N = {1, 2, ...}. The arbitrary 3D shape packing problem is used as an illustration of an application of the metric. The point moment metric has not been developed to replace the measurement of the percentage of volume used but rather to complement it by allowing efficient comparison of apparently equivalent packing arrangements using the same volume of space. It is not suited for comparing two packing arrangements occupying different volumes.

In collaboration with a college teaching construction trades, the authors engaged in developing and deploying a serious game focussed on teaching trench health and safety lessons as an initial investigation into applying edutainment in the construction trades. This paper reviews the background of using interactive technology in construction trades training and presents the observations taken from the developers, teachers and students involved and subsequent conclusions drawn based on these observations. The broad lessons learnt indicate that serious games offer an engaging and innovative medium for delivering training to students who are more comfortable with hands-on learning for a hands-on trade. Although studies are still underway in assessing the long term benefits in retention, the students and teachers involved found the use of gaming technology to be an overall positive experience with some immediately demonstrable benefits. Furthermore, the potential for adopting serious gam...

Rapid advancement of information and communication technologies has brought both challenges and opportunities to the construction industry. There have been significant research and development efforts on the application of systems integration and collaboration technologies in construction. This paper presents a research literature review on systems integration and collaboration in architecture, engineering, construction, and facility management (AEC/FM), and discusses challenging research issues and future research opportunities.

With the rapid advancement of information and communication technologies, particularly Internet and Web-based technologies during the past fifteen years, various systems integration and collaboration technologies have been developed and deployed to different application domains, including architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management (AEC/FM). These technologies provide a consistent set of solutions to support the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of information through the entire product and project lifecycle, and further to integrate people, processes, business systems, and information more effectively. This paper presents a comprehensive review of research literature on systems integration and collaboration in AEC/FM, and discusses challenging research issues and future research opportunities.

With the rapid advancement of information and communication technologies, particularly Internet and Web-based technologies during the past fifteen years, various systems integration and collaboration technologies have been developed and deployed to different application domains, including architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management (AEC/FM). These technologies provide a consistent set of solutions to support the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of information through the entire product and project lifecycle, and further to integrate people, processes, business systems, and information more effectively. This paper presents a comprehensive review of research literature on systems integration and collaboration in AEC/FM, and discusses challenging research issues and future research opportunities.

Changing population demographics and infrastructure demands are having a significant impact on the average level of worker expertise in the North American construction sector. Experienced employees with specialized knowledge are leaving the workforce, and their replacements are required to install and maintain a broader variety of complex systems. Because of this, it is imperative that construction knowledge be quickly and effectively transferred to practitioners through educational processes. However, recent history has demonstrated that traditional techniques may not be effective at transferring sufficient knowledge to eliminate many common mistakes. It has been suggested that new forms of knowledge transfer may be more effective and result in fewer construction errors, especially those which result from installing components out of sequence. In this paper, the authors describe efforts to adapt a traditional paper-based best practice guide into an interactive 3-D tool that can be used on a variety of devices, from laptop computers to commercially available entertainment systems.

The instructor team of large cohort, team- and project-based, first-year engineering design course were faced with a number of common and persistent challenges; effective modelling and scaffolding of the design process; realizing consistent content delivery, marking, and feedback across multiple sections; keeping student teams on track; capturing individual marks related to teamwork; and establishing good design notebook keeping practices. As part of continuing course updates, distributed digital notebooks including worksheets were progressively introduced to support project and team learning activities and individual assessment and feedback. This paper examines the outcomes and lessons learned from the increasingly expanded role these notebooks have taken and their impacts on both instructors and students. In practice, the digital project notebooks have shown themselves to be surprisingly versatile as a platform to 1) deliver course content, 2) enable regular evaluation of individu...

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Engineering design is being carried out by distributed design teams in an effort to use expert human resources more efficiently. The support needs of distributed design are reviewed from a cognitive viewpoint using five broad categories: design methodology, collaboration, teamwork, knowledge management and design representation. Web-based implementation of iterative, structured design methodologies allow greater accessibility to tools and methodologies and more consistent interfaces. Collaboration requires successful and efficient sharing of knowledge, negotiation, coordination and management of activities. In distributed environments, organizational factors and decisions that foster teamwork must be mediated by technology. Design intent, rationale and history are important basic types of knowledge that knowledge management systems are required to capture, organize and manipulate to help generate new design knowledge. Efficient methods of representing design artefacts in different forms are needed that allow designers to interact most efficiently as well as support knowledge capture, transformation and collaborative activities.

Different methods of allowing for wind directionality are discussed and their effects on predicted structural wind loads and responses of buildings and cladding pressures are examined. Results are presented for several tall buildings, for which wind tunnel model tests have been made, as well as for hypothetical buildings with generic aerodynamic signatures. Predictions of extreme wind loads and responses are made in both extra-tropical and tropical wind climates. Three of the analysis methods, namely the worst-case approach, the sector-by-sector method, and the up-crossings method are probabilistic procedures which rely on historical wind records. Also discussed is a time-domain analysis which tracks wind loads and responses during the passage of particular storms. This requires time histories of wind speed and direction that at this time are only available for tropical storms, where Monte Carlo simulations are used to determine time histories of the wind field. Directional factors are extracted from all predictions made in this study. These factors provide direct comparisons of extremes wind loads and effects predicted with particular methods of analysis to the corresponding predictions made with the worst-case method, which does not recognize the azimuthal variation of the aerodynamic data or the directional preferences of severe winds.