by Dan Aukes, as part of ATLAS’ Creativity Technology Today symposium
When: 12:30 – 12:55 PM, Thursday, March 19 2015
Where: Roser ATLAS Building, Cofrin Auditorium (ATLS 100)
A variety of new fabrication technologies are emerging from research laboratories and moving towards everyday use in companies, schools, and at home. These processes, such as “popup-book MEMS” and “Shape Deposition Manufacturing”, support integration of actuators and electronics and permit the development of active mechatronic devices across a variety of size scales. Through the iterative addition and removal of materials with different properties, monolithic devices can exhibit soft, compliant hinges and rigid links within the same part, making them safer and more robust in a human-centered world. As these technologies become more mainstream, new design tools, tailored to the needs of each new process, must be developed to ensure a development workflow which matches the abilities of each process. These workflows must consider not only fabrication methods – they must give insight into the real-world performance issues these non-traditional systems may encounter.
In this talk we present new ways of making complex active devices and robots using non-traditional fabrication techniques, with materials as accessible as cardboard and plastic, and as high-performance as carbon fiber. We also present popupCAD, a new tool for the design of laminate robots, and introduce workflows for quickly prototyping with this paradigm. With this tool, manufacturability analysis and optimization can be automated to suit the constraints and limitations of a variety of fabrication scenarios. We also report on recent work on the analysis of complex robotic systems such as underactuated robotic hands, which are informing the development of new analytic tools in the laminate design space. And finally, using several robots drawn from recent projects and classes as examples, we discuss how merging design, analysis, and manufacturing theory together can improve the design experience for the expert and novice designer alike.
Bio: Dan Aukes is a Wyss Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in Technology Development at Harvard University, where he focuses on the design and manufacturing of micro-robots in conjunction with Rob Wood and the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory. His research topics include design, manufacturing, kinematics, dynamics and simulation of robots, and mechatronic devices. Dan received his Ph.D. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 2013 and 2009, studying the design of underactuated robotic hands under Mark Cutkosky. He worked from 2004 to 2007 as a system integration engineer across a variety of industries, focusing on manufacturing and food processing automation. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University in 2004.