Democratizing the fabrication of robots

Martin Nisser

MIT

Building functional electronic devices is hard. While software creation has become widely accessible with the rise of personal computing in recent decades, the same is not true for creating hardware, its physical counterpart. In comparison to writing or downloading a program, the fabrication of electronic devices - or even robots - can demand significant resources in terms of money, time and manufacturing infrastructure, as well as inaccessible domain expertise. Looking to ways to democratize fabrication to the layman, this talk will discuss low-cost fabrication paradigms such as self-folding, printing, and assembly, and will in particular introduce an integrated design and fabrication pipeline capable of manufacturing fully functioning devices without human intervention, at the push of a button.