It’s CHI time, so it’s time for cool demos.
And here is a good one.
Laser cutting was cool fifteen years ago , so it’s getting to be old hat. We’ve all built things with laser cut parts, adding on parts and wiring to the laser cut skeleton. It takes work to turn the laser cut parts into, say, a working UAV.
But we can do better than that!
The MIT CSAIL folks are demoing a fabrication system that combines a laser cutter with robot placement and construction, to [2].
Yessir, she cuts out the chassis, holes for the rotors and motor, and groves for the wiring. And then, my friends, the robot installs the rotors and motor. And then a robot fills the wiring with melted silver.
Ta, daa! And then….the UAV flies right off the laser cutter!
Now that’s what I call a demo!
It’s even cooler than the video suggests. There is a lot happening behind the scenes.
Aside from the integrated hardware, there is an integrated design tool.
But how does the robot know where to place the parts on the freshly cut chassis? I.e., exactly where is the motor assembly supposed to drop?
What they did is really clever and cool. The laser cutter is programmed to perform certain subtle gestures to mark the position of addons, “like a very specific little shimmy” as Evan Ackerman puts it [1]. The add on robot tracks the accelerometers and reads the secret dance.
This is neat because the laser cutter doesn’t need to be connected to the robot assembler, and the assembler can work with any laser cutter as long as the right shimmies are observable.
Kewl!
- Evan Ackerman, Modified Laser Cutter Fabricates a Ready to Fly Drone, in IEEE Spctrum – Robotics, February 16, 2021. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/modified-laser-cutter-fabricates-a-ready-to-fly-drone
- Rachel Gordon, Fabricating fully functional drones, in MIT News, February 8, 2021. https://news.mit.edu/2021/fabricating-fully-functional-drones-0208
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