Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

My training is in engineering. I got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in systems design engineering, which is an interdisciplinary program, from the University of Waterloo in Canada. The university thought that sometime in the future there would be a need for people to speak more than one engineering language, so it created this program. After several years in the program, I decided that I needed to get a bit more of a firm grounding on some of the more traditional engineering techniques. So I got my PhD in mechanical engineering.

That whole journey took about 14 years, and then in the late 1980s I got picked up by the company Maplesoft to try and figure out ways to present and transform what was essentially a pure mathematics and computer science software product into something that engineers would find appealing. I was one of the few users in the engineering world of the Maple system, which is why I was picked up by the company. I was actually working in more of a marketing and sales context, and from that I was immersed in all sorts of different activities, both technical and more business oriented. All throughout, the theme of education was a very important part of what I was doing, both from a work point of view as well as a personal interest.

I gained a lot of experience from those previous endeavors, and then this year the founders of Quanser approached me. I’ve known them for a long time, and they told me they were going on this exciting journey and wanted me to go with them. So I joined them about half a year ago.

How would you define your role at Quanser?

The core business that the company does is providing laboratory equipment and education solutions to universities. As Chief Education Officer, I am someone who is required to be able to deal with the formalism of education. We’ve gone past the point of just providing great tools and machines for lab exercises. We now have to look at how it all fits into the overall mandate of the university, as well as the emerging influences and trends of global industry. All of the major different challenges that society faces that are typically worked out by engineers are now putting a huge demand on education systems. We do feel that we are part of the solution, and Quanser thought it needed somebody with a fair amount of depth with regard to both technology as well as how people use technology for education. So what I do is help the company figure out strategies to accelerate the transformation from a technology company to something very education-centric.

So is the primary goal at Quanser to provide educational resources?

Historically it wasn’t pure education. It was a series of mechatronics devices and robotic devices that were very high-precision and allowed researchers and educators to explore a lot of newer concepts in computer control of machines. In fact, most of our business for the first ten years was funded by the researchers who would purchase the machines, because they themselves couldn’t design machines of this kind of caliber. But the machines were so tuned to the kinds of experiments they were doing that the match was perfect. Along the way though, in the periphery, these devices started infiltrating the education side of the university, and professors who fell in love with the equipment would introduce it to their students. Concurrently, as that was happening, engineering as a community and society finally started embracing the whole notion of mechatronics and robotics. Probably the greatest example of that were the FIRST Robotics competitions for high school students, which now take place all over. It has become an immense initiative attracting all sorts of different types of types of schools, communities, and companies. So the combination of having the right technology and also having the trends in society aligning with it is what brought us to where we are today.

Can you tell us more about the products you provide for students?

If you consider junior and senior-level college students, you would typically see control systems courses. And in that context it is very common for students to be supplied with one of our machines moving around, allowing students to try controlling it, as well as observing its phenomena.

Now, we’re looking much more into expanding beyond that, and there’s a lot of interest right now in getting some of these techniques from the higher level courses down to the freshman and sophomore level. In those cases, they would be primarily for motivational purposes so students can see what they can expect from later lab experiences.

That’s the kind of creative thinking we’re trying to do right now, and these demands can be fully validated by lots of colleges that are really looking to enhance all parts of their education.

Can you tell us more about the software you use?

LabVIEW is a huge part of it, which is heavily influenced by our partnership with National Instruments. But there is a whole bag full of standard software that engineers use for control systems, modeling and dynamic analysis—all that kind of thing. So definitely LabVIEW, but prior to that, tools like Simulink were important. Even the product that I used to work on, Maple, is part of that family. We’re like any other modern or progressive engineering organization with our software tools.

What kind of tool set is usually provided with the machines to control them?

At the user level it will typically be something like LabVIEW, but we also offer our own software that provides several things that a regular computer cannot. A regular computer can’t really control these things because the machines have to be synchronized according to a real-time clock to allow the algorithms to work properly. With tools like LabVIEW, you don’t need some of the low-level stuff. But we also provide some high-level, easy-to-use control environments for students.

Looking at some of the mechatronics control kits, do you provide models for students to help educate them?

Yes. If you truly want to do engineering design right for the very challenging application areas that industry faces today, not only do you need the whole experimentation and testing—the machine side of things—you also need the modeling and simulation, which is the more theoretical side of things. One of the things we’ve always believed in is that it is not good enough just to provide hands-on experience. You need to provide that hands-on experience in context of the theories and principles the students are learning in the lectures. That whole thought is about modeling and simulation, and doing things more analytical in nature.

What are some of your most exciting products for sale?

One product that always caught my interest, partly because it’s reaching into an audience that is unconventional for a lot of companies like us, is called the Shake Table. It’s an earthquake simulation device. Basically, it looks like a giant bathroom scale on really heavy-duty motors, and it provides the necessary movement to simulate real earthquakes—not just from a bunch of random shaking; we can actually take the data recorded from a real historical earthquake and feed it into the machine for an accurate simulation of the earthquake.

In the educational setting this is used for structural competitions, typically for civil engineering students. The students build structures, whether from toothpicks, LEGOs, or something similar, and they can actually test the quality of their design with a “real” earthquake. It’s a really interesting platform to do more than just hang a weight off of a bridge to see if it collapses. This adds another dimension to the testing process.

On the other side, haptics is a technique to generate feeling on a controller of some sort. For example, if you have a steering wheel connected to a simulation device, we have techniques to actually project feeling onto the steering wheel. So if you’re in a simulation environment where you are in a collision, for instance if you’re hit by another car from behind, the feeling actually comes through the wheel.

More in the area of things like biomedical engineering, there are actually an emerging set of techniques for training surgeons to do dangerous operations in a simulation environment using devices we provide, where surgeons do surgical maneuvers on virtual patients. In these cases, the feeling the surgeons get from the scalpel that is attached to one of our machines is very close to what they would feel in a real-life situation.

Most of our applications tend not to be these romantic things like telemedicine or earthquake engineering; a lot of them are pretty fundamental devices. For example, we have what we call the rotary product line. It is sort of the Cadillac of control systems educational lab equipment. It has a modular design where, based on a single servomotor, you can attach all sorts of different devices to serve various purposes. These tend not to be as big of applications as the others, but they do a great job of isolating key concepts while still providing some real down-to-earth application context.

Do you provide suggested course material along with these products for professors to use when instructing their students?

Yes, that’s one of the things that we’ve always prided ourselves on, and is in many ways what makes us so different from a lot of lab equipment companies. We put considerable effort into the curriculum side so every one of our products has related written material. By doing this, we try to significantly reduce the startup effort by profs and TAs to introduce new equipment and concepts into a lab. This is one of the areas that I’m more directly involved in, and we’re really looking at new media techniques like video, audio and online resources for instruction, and I’m having a lot of fun with that.