Foldable Robotics

Catalog description

Organized around new types of robots being developed in research labs and industry across the country, foldable robots are designed and built using layered, flat sheets of a wide variety of materials and folded up to create both form and motion. Design of these devices begins with initial prototypes and proceeds through implementation and optimization, with a focus on application-specific projects that seek to solve problems of cost, parallelism, complexity and time using a relatively fast and easy prototyping method. Students delve deeper into the analytical problems associated with foldable mechanisms in topics such as design, kinematics, manufacturing, dynamics, simulation, optimization and stiffness analysis. Familiarity with programming fundamentals, scripted languages like Python or Matlab, linear algebra, differential equations, calculus, trigonometry and vector math is strongly suggested.