The How Things Work Project

Project personnel

Faculty: Richard Fikes, Edward Feigenbaum (on leave),
Research Associates: Yumi Iwasaki, Robert Engelmore, Adam Farquhar
Scientific Programmer: James Rice
Ph.D. Students: Tony Loeser, Todd Neller, Sunil Vemuri

Overall project objective

Develop device modeling and model-based reasoning capabilities that are needed by product developers working in distributed collaborative teams to develop, analyze, communicate, coordinate, document, and reuse their designs. In particular, we are developing: This project is supported by DARPA under the MADE (Manufacturing Automation and Design Engineering) program.

Current Activities

We have started implementation of an initial version of CDME with an HTML/JAVA user interface which enables it to be used via a World Wide Web browser. We have also started collaboration with the Satellite Quick Research Testbed (SQUIRT) team of Stanford's Satellite System Development Laboratory in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department to build models of the micro-satellites being developed by them. As part of that collaboration, we have begun using the CDME under development in order to construct domain theories of various domains relevant to microsatellites and models of subsystems of their second-generation microsatellite, called OPAL. The subsystems being modeled include the power subsystem, the pico-satellite launch mechanism, and the stepper motor used in the launch mechanism.

Plans for the next 12 months

Fore more information

Yumi Iwasaki iwasaki@ksl.stanford.edu
Last updated: 9/4/96