A multimedia environment for supporting the teaching of robotics systems

This paper aims at describing an educational system for teaching and learning robotic systems. Multimedia resources were used to construct a virtual laboratory where users are able to use functionalities of a virtual robotic arm, by moving and clicking the mouse without caring about the detailed internal robot operation. Moreover through the multimedia system the user can interact with a real robot arm. The engineering students are the target public of the developed system. With its contents and interactive capabilities, it has been used as a support to the traditional face-to-face classes on the subject of robotics.. In the paper it is first introduced the metaphor of Virtual Laboratory used in the system. Next, it is described the Graphical and Multimedia Environment approach: an interactive graphic user interface with a 3D environment for simulation. Design and implementation issues of the real-time interactive multimedia learning system, which supports the W3C SMIL standard for presenting the real-time multimedia teaching material, are described. Finally, some preliminary conclusions and possible future works from this research are presented.

A logical approach to the management of object identifiers in non-conventional database management systems

Non-conventional database management systems are used to achieve a better performance when dealing with complex data. One fundamental concept of these systems is object identity (OID), because each object in the database has a unique identifier that is used to access and reference it in relationships to other objects. Two approaches can be used for the implementation of OIDs: physical or logical OIDs. In order to manage complex data, was proposed the Multimedia Data Manager Kernel (NuGeM) that uses a logical technique, named Indirect Mapping. This paper proposes an improvement to the technique used by NuGeM, whose original contribution is management of OIDs with a fewer number of disc accesses and less processing, thus reducing management time from the pages and eliminating the problem with exhaustion of OIDs. Also, the technique presented here can be applied to others OODBMSs. © 2011 IEEE.