Roll Initiative

What's better than picking out new dice? Perhaps the excitement and anticipation of time spent with friends and people you love doing something sure to be fun. It's the people that make something awesome, but it's the dice that lets them know you are serious.

Cold Winter Weekend

In a show of solidarity for those of you suffering through snowpocalypse I had a Dairy Queen blizzard. You're welcome.

Imposter Engineer

Despite coming from the generation where supposedly every kid got a trophy just for participating I am not an overly confident person. Don't get me wrong, I am confident in who I am. Thanks to a family that raised me right, no adverse or unstable conditions in my childhood, and now a good support system of that same family, my husband and some friends I feel good about who I am. But when it comes to what kind of engineer I am I have a strong case of imposter syndrome.

Regardless of what level of success they may have achieved in their chosen field of work or study or what external proof they may have of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced internally they do not deserve the success they have achieved and are actually frauds. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they were more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

The engineers whose intelligence I admire come from a mix of backgrounds. Some from prestigious schools, some from less so, and still more who never got a degree but you would never know it based on their top notch job performance. Sometimes I see people at my age and career path who seem to possess a better working knowledge of the equipment and I begin to question why I am even here.

Only occasionally am I surprised in the other direction. I wrote just yesterday about my struggles with report and technical writing only to be surprised today putting together a report with some of my fellow students. Granted I have a lot more experience writing reports than they likely do, but oftentimes I am impressed with their previous knowledge and experience (some a military background) as well as their creativity and innovation. However none of this made them good writers and their portions of the report were unclear and not persuasive.

So I spend a lot of time checking out books from my university library (while I still have access) and reading up on what I wish I knew more about, the thing my group does primarily. Still I don't feel this provides me with the instinct and hands on knowledge I respect from my superiors. And yet, though I feel my university gave me a good theoretical background I've seen other students from the same university and at about the same career point able to grasp theoretical workings of the equipment much faster than I can. So I know there are two paths I need improvement on.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm just not good at this. That perhaps my sparkling personality (you didn't see that coming did you) or mere determination is the only reason I'm still here. It would explain a lot of the unfair treatment I get. At other times I wonder whether I am more competent than I realize, though possibly less so than the people I compare myself to. Other times I wonder if I am excelling and just don't realize it. Then I swing back to thinking I am incompetent and a below average Engineer. One small benefit of working on an interdisciplinary team is how it exposes you to what you do know and other engineers don't. And that's one of the nice things about being surrounded by sparkies (that's EEs) on EngineerBlogs. When they talk about something electrical or build something amazing it doesn't bother me as much because I'm not an EE and I don't feel as bad by comparison. It's more a fun experience of learning a little about something I didn't already know. If only I could apply the same attitude to my own discipline.

Path to a better writer

I am totes swamped today. Hence swamp thing perched above my words. And this is why I only have the neurons to spare for one thoughtful post today. You will have to head over to EngineerBlogs to read my post: Technical Writing Ups & Downs. Because hey, it's on my mind grapes right now. Because guess what I'm swamped with?

Wear to Work Wednesdays #9

The one advantage of Snowpocalypse has got to be cute snow boots.

 

Boots by North Face

Shirt by The Gap

A-line skirt from Land's End

Pashmina scarf from Amazon

Snowflake earrings from Kohl's

Wool coat from Ralph Lauren

 

Pair with some warm tights and shuffle on in to work!

Blogging about STEM

With all this talk about women science bloggers a few have been mentioning a problem. That it seems as if women who blog about science do not get the same attention/audience that men who blog about science. And that women who may start off blogging about science will eventually be compelled to blog about women in science. So I was curious where I stood on the balance.

 

From the pie chart (mmmmpie) I'm actually surprised how much engineering fills up my posts. Of course this is post only, not based on reaction/audience. And I'm surprised how little bitching about work is in there. The women thing I did not foresee when I started blogging but it's something I have strong opinions about so it doesn't bother me it's part of the balance. Clearly I'm not blogging about my cat enough.

 

If any readers/commenters would like to pipe up with suggestions or what they'd like to see more/less of, go right ahead! Like I told my professor today in lecture after he criticized my design and then pseudo-apologized, go ahead, I can take it!

A welding robot for all those hard to reach places

Many of the challenges in ship building or ship maintenance stem from environmental concerns: from the seemingly minor in not wanting ship material or ship waste to enter to the ocean to the obvious preventing future spills or catastrophic failures like the Exxon Valdez. One of the solutions to making liquid-cargo ships more resistant to failure is a double hull design.

When major disasters like mining disasters or situations like the gulf oil spill occur one question people often ask is why we still have humans doing these dangerous jobs. And that comes into play with the welding necessary in assembling a double hull ship design. The space welders have to be in to do their jobs are very small with floors and girders blocking them in and the areas can get extremely hot during the day. All this combined means the work can be extremely dangerous to the people involved. Attempts have been made before to design welding robots that could do the work in place of human workers.

Welding carriages exist but these are limited by often being able only to operate within a few axes of motion. Larger and more flexible 6-axis machines exist but the overhead devices needed to hold these robots don't fit within the confines of a double hull structure. The authors of the study found a viable commercial option that is small and lightweight and able to operate within the small area required but still unable to make the important u-shaped welds often required in these spaces due to limited control and degrees of freedom of the robot.

The designers took the leading commercial welding robot design and came up with some additions to optimize it. One issue with getting the welding robot into the space is the small size of the access hole combined with a heavy and large robot can make it near impossible for human hands to guide it in. They developed a bridge plate that supports the weight of the robot and along with two winches would allow two workers to move the robot in and out of the access hole.

The final design uses both driving wheels on the floor along with passive wheels for guidance overcoming previous design weaknesses that relied on driving wheels only and could not move as accurately with dirt and debris on the ship floor. The rails it drives along fold up to allow it to move in and out of the closed space. It contains a six axis welding manipulator, comparable to other high end commercial devices, along with a sophisticated controller and positioning device. Six AC servo motors (encoders) are directed by a four layered logic modularized controller in the CPU.

Designers also reduced the size of the hand held controller needed to operate the robot as well as adding in the capability of it communicating wirelessly with the robot rather than via a cable. In the end they reduced the time required to weld, still met satisfactory welding standards, and based on field testing have some ideas for future design.

As in many other applications, some of the best developments come out of combining previous successful designs or seemingly slight improvements to the existing solution. This is also one case where field testing proved incredibly useful and I'm sure we'll see some interesting follow up from this study.

Lee, D., Ku, N., Kim, T., Kim, J., Lee, K., & Son, Y. (2011). Development and application of an intelligent welding robot system for shipbuilding Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 27 (2), 377-388 DOI: 10.1016/j.rcim.2010.08.006