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Areas of Expertise
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Active Topic 1: Computer-aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) The fundamental research in computational geometry has led to much result in surface and volumetric object modeling. It has found its applications in design and manufacturing, medical simulation, virtual reality and haptics. High performance computing can be achieved with desktop parallel computing by using graphics hardware acceleration, which will result in a transformative change in the field of parallel computing. We have successfully introduced hardware acceleration into our algorithms and implementation and achieved significant improvement in geometric processing speed. Our research efforts have resulted in many publications in this field.
Active Topic 2: Haptic-augmented Learning for Engineering Education (more details...) Research indicates that students often have difficulty in understanding science and engineering concepts and instructors, likewise, have difficulty in conveying these concepts without effective teaching tools. Computer-mediated instructional technologies, typically in Virtual Environments, hold great promise for use in educational settings in that they can increase students’ access to knowledge and act as vehicles that may promote learning. Recent advances in Virtual Reality and robotics enable the human tactual system to be stimulated in a controlled manner through 3-dimensional (3D) force feedback devices, a.k.a. haptic interfaces. With the addition of haptic (sense of touch) feedback, Virtual Environment / Virtual Reality technology has much greater potential to profoundly change the nature of inquiry in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. In addition, the cost of 3D haptic interface with authentic force feedback continues to drop, which facilitates its wide adoption as the affordable next-generation human-computer interface. The function of this project is to integrate haptic-augmented Virtual Environment technology into the course of ‘Dynamics’ for the undergraduate engineering students. Dynamics is considered to be one of the most difficult and non-intuitive courses that engineering students encounter during their undergraduate study because the course combines basic Newtonian physics and various mathematical concepts such as vector algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus and these were applied to dynamical systems. 3D haptic-augmented learning tools have been created and used to complement the course materials in Dynamics course. Experiments are conducted with a group of Engineering students in the Dynamics class in Spring and Summer 2008 semester at Lamar University. The assessment result shows that the innovative learning tools: 1) allow the students to interact with virtual objects with force feedback and better understand the abstract concepts by investigating the dynamics responses; 2) stimulate the students’ learning interests in understanding the fundamental physics theories. We will post more resulst and release the software source code after Spring 2009 semester experiments.
Active Topic 3: Haptic and Virtual Reality-based Medical Simulation Surgical simulation and anasthesia simluation projects (consulting with Industry). This is a Surgical simulator developed by Dr Zhu with mySmartSim Inc.
Active Topic 4: GPU-accelerated Computational Optimization Our research group is working on Graphics hardware (a.k.a. Graphics Processing Units, GPU) accelerated computational optimization research. GPU technology is emerging as a desktop parallel computing platform that is available on many personal computers. We combine GPU technology with our research in meta-heuristics, such as Genetic Algorithms and Tabu Search, which are generic stochastic optimization algorithms for all kinds of applications in continuous optimization and combinatorial optimization.
Acknowledgment: Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation's Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program under Award No. 0737173 to Drs. W. Zhu, K. Aung, J. Zhou and M. Srinivasan. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work is partially supported by a grant from Texas Hazardous Waste Research Center to Dr. W. Zhu, Dr. J. Curry and Dr. H. Lou at Lamar University. This work was partially supported by several Lamar Research Enhancement Grants to Dr. W. Zhu, Dr. J. Curry and Dr. A. Marquez at Lamar University. Their support is greatly appreciated.
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Maintained by Weihang Zhu, Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Lamar University Last Updated by Weihang Zhu on June 1, 2011 |
