Matter Assembly Computation Lab
CU Boulder, College of Engineering
About the Lab
Hi everyone, thanks for your interest in the Matter Assembly Computation Lab! Our research in the MACLab is motivated by the observation that designing robots, and electromechanical systems, is difficult, time-consuming, and requires a great deal of experience. Practitioners need to be skilled in mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering. Instead, what if making a robot could be as easy as specifying the behaviors or capabilities you want, asking software tools to design the robot, and then printing the robot? This is the overall inspiration for what we’re trying to do in the MACLab.
In support of this general goal we work in several research subareas:
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Design automation for multimaterial fabrication
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Multimaterial simulation
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Fabrication automation (which involves making new 3D printers and control software)
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3D-printable material development and testing.
News
10/9/23
Charles's paper, Determining Optimal Print Orientation Using GPU-Accelerated Convex Hull Analysis, was published at SCF ‘23: Symposium on Computational Fabrication! Check the paper out here. This work was implemented into the open-source Oak Ridge National Laboratory Slicer 2 project.
2/10/23
Lawrence's brief communication on mechanical characterization and constitutive modeling of 3d-printable soft materials is accepted in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing!
2/7/23
Lawrence's manucript introducing the soft robot design tool SoRoForge is published in Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering! More at https://soroforge.com/
6/30/22
Brandon was selected for an NSF Advanced Study Institute short course program on nanotechnology at the University of Cambridge
3/25/22
Our paper on automated synthesis of pneumatic bending soft actuators was accepted for publication at Robosoft 2022 in Edinburgh, Scotland!
3/25/22
Our paper on leveraging shell finite element simulations for simulation of pneumatic soft actuators was accepted for publication at Robosoft 2022 in Edinburgh, Scotland!
3/25/22
Our paper on reduced-order modeling of HASEL-powered soft robotic systems was accepted for publication at Robosoft 2022 in Edinburgh, Scotland!
3/25/22
Our work on Design and Fabrication of Realistic, Presurgical Planning Models through Bitmap Printing was published in JOVE video journal!
9/9/21
Our paper on soft actuator design is featured on the CU Boulder ME website!
8/26/21
Our paper on soft actuator design wins IEEE-CASE Best Application Paper Award at 2021 CASE Conference in Lyon, France!