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There has been a significant gap between the tools used for the design of a building's architectural form and those that evaluate the structural physics of that form. Seeking to bring the perspectives of visual design and structural engineering closer together, we developed and evaluated a design tool for students and practitioners to explore the inter-relationships between the "form" and "structure" of long-span structures. We have developed an interactive 3D design application for spatial structures that integrates with a web simulation service, enabling the iterative analytic comparison of designs by structural weight, force distribution, member deflection and stability. In this paper, we describe the design and development of this Structure And Form Analysis System (SAFAS) tool using the usability engineering methodology, presenting its evolution and evaluation though four semesters of use in undergraduate architecture classes. In this paper we present our summative results and lessons learned for the usability engineering of e-Learning systems, scientific visualization of structural dynamics, and user skill sets.

Team ViGIR entered the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) with a focus on developing software to enable an operator to guide a humanoid robot through the series of challenge tasks emulating disaster response scenarios. The overarching philosophy was to make our operators full team members and not just mere supervisors. We designed our operator control station (OCS) to allow multiple operators to request and share information as needed to maintain situational awareness under bandwidth constraints, while directing the robot to perform tasks with most planning and control taking place onboard the robot. Given the limited development time, we leveraged a number of open source libraries in both our onboard software and our OCS design; this included significant use of the robot operating system libraries and toolchain. This paper describes the high level approach, including the OCS design and major onboard components, and it presents our DRC Trials results. The paper concludes with a number of lessons learned that are being applied to the final phase of the competition and are useful for related projects as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]