Happy new year from the PTC Education Advanced Technology Team. We hope everyone had a nice holiday break and is looking forward to the Spring semester. This year, we are excited to continue growing this community of key collaborators using PTC technologies in research and teaching, while working to develop integrations that further enable digital transformation in education and industry.

Please reach out to us at EduTech@ptc.com with any questions, or if you would like to share opportunities for collaborations in this newsletter. If you did not receive this letter directly, please complete this form to be added to the mailing list. 

The first webinar of the semester has been rescheduled in honor of MLK day and will take place on January 25th at 9am EDT with a talk from the Reality Lab at PTC about spatial computing and how it could be used in research and teaching. Please use this URL to join the webinar on January, 25th at 9AM EDT. Passcode to join: 94B=tMn#

PTC Innovation Hackathon (please pass along to any students who may be interested) – We are delighted to invite you to the 2021 Innovation Hackathon sponsored by PTC! The challenges of the Hackathon are within the realm of computer vision and CAD for industrial applications. The Hackathon program will take place virtually with a series of online mentoring and coding sessions from January 20th– February 22nd. You can find more in the PDF linked here. If you are a student, passionate about new technologies and research applied in the industry, then this event might be for you! You can register either as an individual or with your teamhere. Participation is limited to 30 students. 

Please reach out if you would like to share any announcements or recruit research partners through PTC’s academic collaborator network. 

Owen Gervais, a mechanical engineering student at Tufts University working with Professor Chris Rogers, conducted research using models of robots created in Onshape. Using this configurable Onshape document of the LEGO Spike Prime robotic kit, he modeled a self-balancing robot that was exported to the simulator Gazebo, where he developed a control system to keep the robot upright. He then built the physical robot that matched the Onshape model and applied the system developed in Gazebo to balance the robot. Learn more by clicking here.

The student research associates on the Advanced Technologies Team developed this demonstration showing a UR3e robot arm being controlled with checkpoints using Vuforia Spatial Toolbox. In addition to controlling the motion of the arm, the team added spatially contextualized indicators showing the current joint angles on the robot and is controlling a digital twin of the arm in Onshape with API calls from the Spatial Toolbox. Watch their video here!

We are hiring! The Education Advanced Technologies Team will be hiring Student Research Associates for the Summer from May through July. Please reach out if you have any students who may be interested in applying for the internship.

Check out the new features included in the latest release of Onshape, and Vuforia Studio 9.0.0 has just been released.