Giunta, L., & Wright, H., & Chandra Shekar, S., & Gururajan, S. (2022, August), Student Paper: Developing an Extensive Virtual Reality Environment for Learning Aerospace Concepts  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41814

\bibitem{asee_peer_41814}
  Giunta, L., \& Wright, H., \& Chandra Shekar, S., \& Gururajan, S. (2022, August), \emph{Student Paper: Developing an Extensive Virtual Reality Environment for Learning Aerospace Concepts}
  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN.
  10.18260/1-2--41814

Luke Giunta, Henry Wright, Siddharth Chandra Shekar, and Srikanth Gururajan.  "Student Paper: Developing an Extensive Virtual Reality Environment for Learning Aerospace Concepts".  2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August.  ASEE Conferences, 2022.  https://peer.asee.org/41814 Internet.  15 Dec, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_41814}
  Luke Giunta, Henry Wright, Siddharth Chandra Shekar, and Srikanth Gururajan.
  "Student Paper: Developing an Extensive Virtual Reality Environment for Learning Aerospace Concepts".
  \emph{2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2022.
  https://peer.asee.org/41814 Internet.  15 Dec, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_41814
author = "Luke Giunta, Henry Wright, Siddharth Chandra Shekar, and Srikanth Gururajan"
title = "Student Paper: Developing an Extensive Virtual Reality Environment for Learning Aerospace Concepts"
booktitle = "2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2022"
month = "August"
address = "Minneapolis, MN"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/41814}
number = {10.18260/1-2--41814}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Current methodologies for teaching aircraft dynamics and controls through simulations revolve around traditional techniques that use software packages such as Matlab/Simulink. Often these techniques offer visualizations in the form of time response graphs and various frequency plots. These visualizations are adequate for a simplistic understanding of aircraft dynamics but are lacking in their contribution to a student’s intuitive understanding – including aircraft coordinate systems, transformations between the coordinate systems, the differences between lateral and longitudinal dynamics and the effects of changes in aircraft designs on the dynamics, the external forces acting on the aircraft, the aerodynamic characteristics of the fuselage, wings and tails, steady state forces and the different moments acting along different axes. in real-time.

Traditional techniques could also restrict the rate at which a student can gain and retain a deeper understanding of these core concepts. Current methods do not facilitate an adequate understanding of a vehicle’s dynamics over a large flight envelope without extensive input and coding from the user. These inputs are time consuming and the usual outputs (response graphs, root locus, etc.) form a segmented understanding of vehicle dynamics. This research aims to investigate the effect that a dynamic virtual reality environment could have on a student’s understanding and intuition regarding aircraft coordinate systems and vehicle dynamics in real time.  

The platform in which all the work in this effort is based on is Unity, an open source cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies.  The design of the virtual environment is based on a fixed wing UAS that is widely used in research efforts at our lab at our university. as a part of this effort, student evaluators will be asked to wear a VR headset through which they can enter the VR world and visualize the airplane in 3 dimensions. The teleportation feature of Unity and the Virtual Reality environment will enable them to walk around the model; we envision designing buttons/switches which when selected shows different set of aircraft parameters. For example, consider the aerodynamic and flightpath angles of an aircraft. When this option is selected, the students can “see” these three angles (Angle of Attack (ɑ), Angle of Sideslip (β) and Flight path angle (γ)) rendered, along with a model of the aircraft, and can also see how they are defined (angle between which two vectors).  With the help of sliders, or other gestures built into the VR interface, students can change the orientation of the aircraft and visualize the relationships between these angles and better understand their influence in flight dynamics. 

 Facebook’s Oculus Quest was chosen as our interfacing tool with the virtual environment due to its ease of use and configurability. The Quest includes the VR headset and two handheld controllers and also supports finger tracking without having to use other add-ons like Leap Motion. We conducted several tests with students in the senior year of aerospace engineering education and evaluate the effectiveness of this VR based tool as compared to teaching using a traditional whiteboard. Depending on the availability of time, we will also try to extend this capability to at least one other class (likely on automatic controls), with the hope of evaluating the effectiveness of this tool in teaching engineering classes.
AU  - Luke Giunta
AU  - Henry Wright
AU  - Siddharth Chandra Shekar
AU  - Srikanth Gururajan
CY  - Minneapolis, MN
DA  - 2022/08/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Student Paper: Developing an Extensive Virtual Reality Environment for Learning Aerospace Concepts
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/41814
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--41814
ER  -