I-Corps: A Design Driven Educational Robotics Framework

Award ID: 1823736

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is in providing a design-driven robotics framework encompassing a low-cost, modular robot hardware kit, a software app for motion design, and a web-based Computer-Aided Design (CAD) environment to enable students, makers, hobbyists, and industry practitioners to innovate and invent robots and machines. The framework brings together computational thinking, design process, and programming to meet STEM imperatives and provide compelling value propositions for both the education and prototyping industry. The proposed robotics framework has the potential to fill 2.5 million unfilled jobs in STEM and positively impact the U.S. educational robotics market, which is expected to grow to $2.7 billion by 2021. This I-Corps project leverages the latest research in mechanism synthesis area to create novel algorithms for designing motions of planar linkage mechanisms. Planar linkage mechanisms are rigid bodies connected to one another using rotating or sliding joints and their special configurations give rise to desired motion. Their implementation in a mobile app provides users an ability to synthesize and simulate mechanisms for robots and machines. While, the robot hardware kit employs inexpensively produced novel planar and compliant pieces to create a new method of interconnection to realize three-dimensional geometry and mechanisms of robots and structures, the web-based CAD tool would allow users to design customized robot parts. The flexibility of the design allows for the use of any programming platform and any readily available sensors and actuators thereby dramatically broadening the inventions design capabilities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Ruth Shuman