Distinguished Seminar Series

Title:

Automated Design and Fabrication of Multimaterial Functional Systems

Abstract:

Dr. MacCurdy leads the Matter Assembly Computation Lab (MACLab), which develops new algorithms, materials, and print methods to design and print on-demand functional artefacts, from personalized surgical planning models to soft robots customized for a specific user’s needs. 

Current electromechanical design practice is predicated on the exercise of expert-level judgement through an interactive and iterative design and fabrication process that requires skilled humans at every step. This approach does not scale because it is labor intensive, and therefore biases robots toward longer-lasting, more general-purpose (and expensive) designs in order to justify the development and fabrication costs. Many robot applications might be better-served by rapidly-built special-purpose or single-use machines, but automated design and fabrication tools will be critical to control costs, accelerate development, and be responsive to application needs. 

My overall goal is to make electromechanical systems (including robots) so easy to design and fabricate that we could enable people who are application experts (but not necessarily robot design or fabrication experts) to rapidly create robots for their specific needs. With this future in mind, we are creating new design tools to convert high-level requirements specified by non-experts into concrete multimaterial electromechanical design plans, new materials that leverage multimaterial additive manufacturing, and new multimaterial fabrication methods to automatically convert these designs into functional robots. I will highlight each of these elements and show example application areas.
 

Bio:

Dr. Robert MacCurdy is an assistant professor in mechanical engineering (also by courtesy in computer science and electrical engineering) at the University of Colorado Boulder where he leads the Matter Assembly Computation Lab (MACLab). Rob is also a National Geographic Explorer. He is developing new tools to automatically design and manufacture robots, and automated methods to study animal behavior in the wild. 

Rob did his PhD work with Hod Lipson at Cornell University and his postdoctoral work at MIT with Daniela Rus. Funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Liebmann Fund fellowship, his doctoral work demonstrated systems capable of automatically assembling functional electromechanical devices, with the goal of printing robots that literally walk out of the printer. During this time he also created low-cost, low power, and low-mass radiofrequency tags, and developed an “inverse-GPS” tracking system based on time-of-flight measurements that use 3 orders of magnitude less energy than GPS. 

He holds a B.A. in Physics from Ithaca College, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and an M.S. and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University. Prior to his Doctoral work, Dr. MacCurdy spent 10 years at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology, where he worked as a research engineer developing remote-monitoring tools for birds and wildlife. These systems employed methods including acoustic, radiofrequency, solar-geolocation, and inertial; battery energy-density limitations led to research in multisource energy harvesting, and the first vibration energy harvesters applied to flying insects and birds. Thousands of his terrestrial and marine autonomous recording units (ARUs) have been deployed worldwide and are still in widespread use.

Title:

Engineering the Future of Ultrasound: New Strategies for Sensing and Imaging