I am enabling rapid design and automatic fabrication of next-gen. robots and electro-mechanical structures at the press of a button - with zero intermediate-processing and assembly steps. By enabling simultaneous fabrication of functional electronics within 3D structures with very-high degree of customization, it not only overcomes many existing limitations in manufacturability -- It enables entirely new design architectures and capabilities that were previously not possible.
Why robots need to be more life-like
Robots need to evolve from clunky, rigid machines towards being "Life-like", in form and function. This requires dense-integration between rigid and soft components, embedded electronic circuits, multi-modal sensing, and energy-efficient computing.
[ Similar to biological systems:Â hard bones & soft muscles || thousands of nerve-endings || energy-efficient brain ]
Integrating such capability into robots and other devices requires a fundamental shift in our manufacturing methods from the ground-up.
Sensors are typically afterthoughts in system design, causing low-density integration, limited stimuli detection, and "blind spots". Current robots' heavy reliance on computer vision drives high computational power consumption. Printed-in-place sensors and distributed-computing elements with integrated wiring during fabrication dramatically reduce assembly complexity and material usage -- while enabling rapid design iterations and endless customization
Why robotics and hardware manufacturing needs a major upgrade
The gap between robots and biological systems begins at the material level. Living things have evolved to have hierarchical organization of adaptive materials that integrate mechanical support, sensory feedback, and distributed processing - all within a seamless package.
Today's robots are still constrained by traditional manufacturing methods that separate structure from function. Since our design-methodology is integrally tied to our mass-production methods, robots still remain as collections of discrete components that mutually-limit the design freedom to achieve peak performance due to their individual form-factors and wiring pathways.
Despite the advances in algorithms and primary locomotion, we will soon hit a bottleneck in performance. To address this issue, we need a way to integrate data-rich sensing, adaptive multi-functional materials, purpose-built rigid & soft actuators of many types, resilient structures.