By Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL
From Star Trek’s replicators to Richie Rich’s wishing machine, popular culture has a long history of parading flashy machines that can instantly output any item to a user’s delight.
While 3D printers have now made it possible to produce a range of objects that include product models, jewelry, and novelty toys, we still lack the ability to fabricate more complex devices that are essentially ready-to-go right out of the printer.
A group from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) recently developed a new system to print functional, custom-made devices and robots, without human intervention. Their single system uses a three-ingredient recipe that lets users create structural geometry, print traces, and assemble electronic components like sensors and actuators.
“LaserFactory” has two parts that work in harmony: a software toolkit that allows users to design custom devices, and a hardware platform that fabricates them.
CSAIL PhD student Martin Nisser says that this type of “one-stop shop” could be beneficial for product developers, makers, researchers, and educators looking to rapidly prototype things like wearables, robots, and printed electronics.
“Making fabrication inexpensive, fast, and accessible to a layman remains a challenge,” says Nisser, lead author on a paper about LaserFactory that will appear in the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May. “By leveraging widely available manufacturing platforms like 3D printers and laser cutters, LaserFactory is the first system that integrates these capabilities and automates the full pipeline for making functional devices in one system.”
Let’s say a user has aspirations to create their own drone. They’d first design their device by placing components on it from a parts library, and then draw on circuit traces, which are the copper or aluminum lines on a printed circuit board that allow electricity to flow between electronic components. They’d then finalize the drone’s geometry in the 2D editor. In this case, they’d use propellers and batteries on the canvas, wire them up to make electrical connections, and draw the perimeter to define the quadcopter’s shape.
The user can then preview their design before the software translates their custom blueprint into machine instructions. The commands are embedded into a single fabrication file for LaserFactory to make the device in one go, aided by the standard laser cutter software. On the hardware side, an add-on that prints circuit traces and assembles components is clipped onto the laser cutter.
Similar to a chef, LaserFactory automatically cuts the geometry, dispenses silver for circuit traces, picks and places components, and finally cures the silver to make the traces conductive, securing the components in place to complete fabrication.
The device is then fully functional, and in the case of the drone, it can immediately take off to begin a task — a feature that could in theory be used for diverse jobs such as delivery or search-and-rescue operations.
As a future avenue, the team hopes to increase the quality and resolution of the circuit traces, which would allow for denser and more complex electronics.
As well as fine-tuning the current system, the researchers hope to build on this technology by exploring how to create a fuller range of 3D geometries, potentially through integrating traditional 3D printing into the process.
“Beyond engineering, we’re also thinking about how this kind of one-stop shop for fabrication devices could be optimally integrated into today’s existing supply chains for manufacturing, and what challenges we may need to solve to allow for that to happen,” says Nisser. “In the future, people shouldn’t be expected to have an engineering degree to build robots, any more than they should have a computer science degree to install software.”
This research is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation. The work was also supported by a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship and The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Most of the ocean is unknown. Yet we know that the most challenging environments on the planet reside in it. Understanding the ocean in its totality is a key component for the sustainable development of human activities and for the mitigation of climate change, as proclaimed by the United Nations. We are glad to share our perspective about the role of soft robots in ocean exploration and offshore operations at the outset of the ocean decade (2021-2030).
In this study of the Soft Systems Group (part of The School of Engineering at The University of Edinburgh), we focus on the two ends of the water column: the abyss and the surface. The former is mostly unexplored, containing unknown physical, biological and chemical properties; the latter is where industrial offshore activities take place, and where human operators face dangerous environmental conditions.
The analysis of recent developments in soft robotics brought to light their potential in solving some of the challenges that industry and scientists are facing at sea. The paper offers a discussion about how we can use the latest technological advances in soft robotics to overcome the limitations of existing technology. We synthesise the crucial characteristics that future marine robots should include.
Today we know that industrial growth needs to be supported by deep environmental and technological knowledge in order to develop human activities in a sustainable manner. Therefore, the remotest areas of the ocean constitute a common frontier for oceanography, robotics and offshore industry. The first challenge then is to create an interdisciplinary space where marine scientists, ocean engineers, roboticists and industry can communicate.
The offshore renewable energy sector is growing fast. By definition, wind and wave energy is better sourced from areas of the seas with a high energy content, which translates into wave dominated environments. In such conditions, operating in the vicinity of an offshore platform is dangerous for personnel and potentially destructive for traditional robots.
Recent development in soft robotics unveiled novel, bio-inspired maneuvering techniques, fluidic logic data logging capabilities and unprecedented dexterity. These characteristics would enable data collection, maintenance and repair interventions, unfeasible with rigid robots.
Traditional devices, often tethered, rigid and with limited activity range, cannot tackle the environmental conditions where ocean exploration is needed the most. The devices needed for ocean exploration require an innovative payload and delicate sampling capabilities. Soft sensors and soft gripping techniques are optimum candidates to push ocean exploration into fragile and unknown areas that require delicate sampling and gentle navigation. The inherent compliance of soft robots also protects the environment and the payload from damage. More importantly, recent studies have highlighted the potential for the manufacturing of soft robots to be entirely biocompatible and, hence, to minimise the impact on the natural environment in case of loss or mass deployment.
In a nutshell, soft robots for marine exploration and offshore deployment offer the advantage, over traditional devices, of novel navigation and manipulation techniques, unprecedented sensing and sampling capabilities, biocompatibility and novel memory and data logging methods. With this study we wish to invite a multidisciplinary approach in order to create novel sustainable soft systems.