Rapid Assemblers From Analog to Digital Additive Manufacturing

Rapid Assemblers: From Analog to Digital Additive Manufacturing Hod Lipson, Jonathan Hiller Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Computing & Information Science Cornell University Computational Synthesis Lab

Conclusions • Digital Materials – Comprise lattice of physical voxels – High precision, work with incompatible materials – Tunable properties • Rapid Assemblers – Assembles millions of prefabricated components into a integrated active structure – Parallel (laser printer) – Serial (inkjet printer)

Printable Robots

Fab@home Model 1

Fab@home Model 2

With Max Lobovsky

With Larry Bonassar, Daniel Cohen

Zinc-air Batteries Zinc-Air

IPMC Actuators

With Evan Malone

Gershenfeld, 2005

Digital Materials

700 1, 000 4, 500, 000 187, 000 363, 000 80, 000 10, 000 25, 000

• • Challenges How to make voxels How to assemble billions of voxels How to simulate and design voxel-based systems

Key Challenges • How to fabricate voxels • How to assemble billions of voxels • How to simulate and design in voxel space

Printing Digital Materials Parallel Assembly

Build Chamber Material Feeder

Fabricator

With Jonathan Hiller

Spheres

3 D Circuits

Printing Digital Materials Rapid Serial Assembly

Vox. Jet

Accelerated x 4

Voxels Tunable Material Properties

Tiles

Modeling - COMSOL

Simulating: Relaxation

Tile Precision

Dithering Materials

Tuning Elastic modulus

Tuning CTE

Auxetic Materials

Spheres

Precision x 0. 1 x 0. 5

Smart Voxels Future Directions

50 0 µm

500µm

Electrical conductivity

3 D Micro-fluidics

Heterogeneous Tissue Engineering

Gershenfeld, 2005

From Analog to Digital

Conclusions • Digital Materials – Comprise lattice of physical voxels – High precision, work with incompatible materials – Tunable properties • Rapid Assemblers – Assembles millions of prefabricated components into a integrated active structure – Parallel (laser printer) – Serial (inkjet printer) • New functionality – Desktop manufacturing of complex, 3 D integrated active devices, without special tooling

Jeff I. Lipton Jonathan Hiller Daniel L. Cohen Evan Malone