Cyberinfrastructure Tools in Engineering Education for Teleoperation Experiments

⎯ Hazard mitigation and structural dynamics have been important additions to the undergraduate civil engineering curriculum. UCIST (University Consortium on Instructional Shake Tables) has worked toward improving educational opportunities in this area for nearly 10 years. For the past 8 years, the US National Science Foundation has sponsored a cyberenvironment project referred to as the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). Through a partnership between NEES and UCIST, we are working to enhance earthquake engineering education around the world. The development of teleoperation and teleparticipation exercises for bench-scale instructional shake tables based around the NEES suite of tools will allow future civil engineers to learn fundamental concepts in structural dynamics. This paper will discuss the establishment of a collaboratory of bench-scale instructional shake table deployment sites. This collaboratory provides for real-time online laboratory experiments, leveraging the unique capabilities of the NEES initiative to offer experiences previously unavailable to undergraduate students. The paper will describe two of the initial laboratory exercise developed to educate undergraduate students in the fundamentals of earthquake engineering (e.g. structural engineering, structural dynamics). In addition to direct educational benefits, the indirect outcomes of these exercises include an introduction to virtual presence technology and collaborative computing tools, broadening their exposure to tools that will become essential for future engineers. Index Terms ⎯Earthquake engineering; Shake table; Teleoperation; Virtual Experiments.