Utah MADEFAST Visit 21 June 94

The follow-on to this meeting was Carolyn Valiquette / 5-6 July 94.

Sam Drake and Carolyn Valiquette from the University of Utah Computer Science Department visited Palo Alto and met with

Mark Cutkosky (Stanford)
Glenn Kramer (EIT)
Larry Leifer (Stanford)
Charles Petrie (Stanford)
Jayachandra Reddy (EIT)
Jim Slater (Robotics Inc.)
Marty Tenenbaum (EIT)
George Toye (Stanford)

Design

Much designing was done. The artifact design work can be seen in the current state of the design.

Some extra design notes are that prototyping the seeker falls into three categories:

frames/mechanical pieces
motors/sensors/actuators/electronics
optics/parts/simulations

Often only mechanical fabrication is considered.

Misc. Notes

Parts, such as motors are hard to get. PartNet is not yet ready. Also, these motors are custom and the lead time is long - 60 to 90 days. Need a way to find out information about what motors will be manufactured in near future and try to "piggyback" off of these. Good electronic catalog project - need to simulate for Madefast. The general issue of collaborative procurement is a Madefast result.

Sam saw an mbone demo with full video. The frame rate was very slow and unimpressive. The video was important to Sam though not to some of the rest of us: obviously collaboration tools are going to have to fit different styles. A lot of work went into reducing some GIFs to PS files less than 30K (see pub/MADEFAST/ps-picts in anon ftp cdr.stanford.edu) and most were unusuable. Mbone just isn't quite there yet, but the allure of being able to jointly mark-up a drawing over the Internet is still strong.

It is worth noting that this demo did combine the use of Mosaic and Mbone. The Shared Whiteboard was used to pull up small images to point to and annotate. But the best use was to write a URL on the board for the other person to open. BTW, we did have three workstations active.

The GIF images Sam had produced required some color editing under "xv" to look good. Is this a general problem?

We should use ACaPS to produce a cable for Madefast.

Sam found the decision graphs hard to follow. What's a better representation?

Is there a redesign scenario?

Engineering Collaboration Services

This is a major deliverable. There were several insights:

Services consist of people+tools. Some services might be all tool, such as a CAD format translator, and others might be all person, such as an optics engineering consultant, but most fall in between theses two extremes.
The Madefast Directory of Services may include services that don't exist yet. Part of the deliverable is to identify the services that are needed. This is an action item.
Services need motivation. Consider the service of consulting. How can Madefast provide a community of willing engineering expertise. This gets into the subject of barriers.

Barriers

The Madefast community potentially can offer a wide range of expertise, as evidenced by the expriment with answering the random question on Ti galling. But there was surprising little public discussion on Madefast issues. How could we motivate industrial engineers (say in Hughes or Lockheed or TI) to contribute advice? Or even professors? Offer money? One idea was to also have an Information Broker, who for a cut, would help find the resouce to answer the question, though this might be a problem if s/he had to be a "jack of all trades". Can services be bartered?
How does one change the work habits of engineers and designers to adapt to new coolaborative practices? How does one reward collaboration? Or measure it?
Not everyone that needs to serve or be served is on the Internet. And many of those who are are behind a firewall. Some cannot access this very information because their firewall only allows email.

Process

Joe Wagner will start ray tracing for mirror design. Sam will evaluate making mirrors at Utah. Mark will see if Sandia Labs might make them.
Can animation services be developed at Utah? Cornell?
Larry Pfeiffer to be recruited at Stanford to work on servo design.
Jayachandra Reddy to work on design documentation, including exisiting high-level graphs and detailed stuff in the "mfa" archives.
Carolyn will return 5 July 94 to EIT/Stanford to continue final ISAT presentation planning.
If mbone is not "ready for prime time", can X-Share substitute as a shared whiteboard? Can we use commercial tools such as "same person" or "first person"? Do we have time to try?
One great idea is to extend Mosaic so that a click replays screen gestures as well as annotations. This should be added to possible tools.
Utah will start asking MSU what information they need to evaluate whether their composites fab service might provide the outer body and fairing for the seeker.
Marty will check with ARPA about Madefast funding confirmation.
More general and important stuff is in the state of process page.

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Charles Petrie