Related papers: The dog-and-rabbit chase problem as an exercise in…
Introductory mechanics ("physics 1") is a critical gateway course for students desiring to pursue a STEM career. A major challenge with this course is that there is a large spread in the students' incoming physics preparation, and this…
In this study, we examine introductory physics students' ability to perform analogical reasoning between two isomorphic problems which employ the same underlying physics principles but have different surface features. Three hundred and…
This dissertation considers Open-world Robot Manipulation, a manipulation problem where a robot must generalize or quickly adapt to new objects, scenes, or tasks for which it has not been pre-programmed or pre-trained. This dissertation…
It is a crucial problem in robotics field to cage an object using robots like multifingered hand. However the problem what is the caging for general geometrical objects and robots has not been well-described in mathematics though there were…
This paper presents a problem of model learning for the purpose of learning how to navigate a ball to a goal state in a circular maze environment with two degrees of freedom. The motion of the ball in the maze environment is influenced by…
A central aspect of robotic motion planning is collision avoidance, where a multitude of different approaches are currently in use. Optimization-based motion planning is one method, that often heavily relies on distance computations between…
The classic brachistrochrone problem is standard material in intermediate mechanics. Many variations exist including some accessible to introductory students. While a quantitative solution isn't feasible in introductory classes, qualitative…
As research-based self-paced e-learning tools become increasingly available, a critical issue educators encounter is implementing strategies to ensure that all students engage with them as intended. Here, we discuss the effectiveness of…
We present a method for incorporating a stochastic point of view into physics exercises of mathematics education. The core of our method is the randomization of some inputs, the system model used does not differ from what we would use in…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a given problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
Learning physics requires understanding the applicability of fundamental principles in a variety of contexts that share deep features. One way to help students learn physics is via analogical reasoning. Students can be taught to make an…
This paper presents some ideas which might assist teachers incorporating special relativity into an introductory physics curriculum. One can define the proper-time/velocity pair, as well as the coordinate-time/velocity pair, of a traveler…
We study a pursuit-evasion problem which can be viewed as an extension of the keep-away game. In the game, pursuer(s) will attempt to intersect or catch the evader, while the evader can visit a fixed set of locations, which we denote as the…
Students in introductory calculus-based physics not only have difficulty understanding the fundamental physical concepts, they often have difficulty relating those concepts to the mathematics they have learned in math courses. This produces…
In this paper I describe the design of an introductory course in Human-Robot Interaction. This project-driven course is designed to introduce undergraduate and graduate engineering students, especially those enrolled in Computer Science,…
This contribution shows that the main topics of Relativity can be discussed at an elementary level and in a considerable extent - including the formal results of "Time Dilation" and "Lorentz Contraction" - by a minor modification of the…
We describe how graduate students categorize introductory mechanics problems based on the similarity of their solutions. Graduate students were asked at the end of a teaching assistant training class to categorize problems from their own…
With inspiration from the classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser [1], we asked introductory physics students in three introductory physics classes to categorize mechanics problems based upon similarity of solutions. To evaluate the…
The Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K) is a multiple choice test developed by Beichner to assess students' understanding of kinematics graphs. Many of the items on the TUG-K have strong distractor choices which correspond to…
This paper comprehensively surveys research trends in imitation learning for contact-rich robotic tasks. Contact-rich tasks, which require complex physical interactions with the environment, represent a central challenge in robotics due to…