With the emerging global environment, the requirements of today's engineers are expanding rapidly. Today engineers must be able to collaborate with their colleagues around the world. In response to this new demand, the idea of the International Virtual Design Studio (IVDS) emerged. The IVDS projects at Union College have included collaborations with the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey, and ESIGELEC in Rouen, France. In both projects students at Union communicated via the Internet to design, manufacture, and test engineering solutions to problems. The projects culminated with the Union students traveling to France and Turkey to submit their work for review.
Currently there are no ongoing IVDS projects, but it is hoped that this opportunity will be reinstituted.
The objectives of the projects are two-fold. First, they serve as models of collaborative design experiences between students in remote locations. Second, they give students a valuable international design experience in which they communicate with foreign students to design, construct, and test a vehicle.
The IVDS projects with ESIGELEC have been centered around research projects in the area of robotics. Union students worked with faculty and graduate students from ESIGELEC in Rouen, France, to design and fabricate robotics limbs for an ongoing research project on the control of autonomous walking robots.
The IVDS projects with METU have centered around the ME-407 Mechanical Engineering design course at METU. This course is structured in a competition format where students work as teams to build devices that conform to the competition guidelines. The competition criteria include common engineering performance criteria such as speed, power, and cost. Union students formed teams with METU students to design, over the Internet, a device to enter in the competition. Union students traveled to Turkey in January to enter their devices in the competition.