In the Sky and the Ocean Bottom: Pens, Printers, and Underwater Robots

Sophy Ramírez  | 23 de noviembre de 2018  | Vistas: 19

The mechanical engineer Michael Bell shares some of the work and projects he has been working on through his career, showing different ways that electronics, mechanics, and robotics can innovate in the science that is already developed.

He starts by giving a little background about himself, names out some of the companies he had worked for, like NASA and Tesla motors; and his studies at Harvard.

Then he exposes the first project, named Circuits Scribe, that allows people to write circuits on paper and make it work. He shows a short video of the pen, and gives the objective of the project,  information about its function and the development.

The main purpose of this was stand education with science, technology, engineering, and math.”

The second innovation presented is a multi-material digital manufacturing, a machine that started at the same time as the pen, but this is about putting electronic circuits on 3D prints and he shows a video that explains the project too.

He gives a bit of the story of how the company grew up, with the support of Harvard University and raising money. This invention put them in the 9 best ideas at the CES, and in the 50 smartest companies that the MIT Technology review.

His last project is more focused in robotics, an underwater robot that was part of a research that the US Navy required about the family of the starfish the echinoderms and how these species move in water, they wanted to create a device that could be used as the starfish locomote.

What makes this starfish really interesting are theirs toob feet on its surface, they have a little pat on the bottom which many people thinks are suctioning cups but they are actually glued, so it segregates a glue and attached on a surface and then segregate another substance that dissolves that glue.”

So the starfish was the great inspiration for the project. He shows the first prototype of the project, explains how it works, the elements that it has to function the right way, and then shows some of the final resulted robots.

To conclude he remarks another underwater robot they are developing so that in the future can be a source of fuel for the starfish robots.