Penn Joins MIT-led Project on ’Printable Robots’

The University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University are taking part in an ambitious new project, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to reinvent how robots are designed and produced. Funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the project will aim to develop a desktop technology that would make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours. "Our goal is to develop technology that enables anyone to manufacture their own customized robot. This is truly a game changer," said Vijay Kumar, deputy dean for education in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, who is leading the team from Penn. "It could allow for the rapid design and manufacture of customized goods and change the way we teach science and technology in high schools." Engineering professors Sanjeev Khanna and Insup Lee and associate professor Andre DeHon will join Kumar on the five-year project called An Expedition in Computing for Compiling Printable Programmable Machines. "This research envisions a whole new way of thinking about the design and manufacturing of robots and could have a profound impact on society," said MIT professor Daniela Rus, leader of the project and a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. "We believe that it has the potential to transform manufacturing and to democratize access to robots." It currently takes years to produce, program and design a functioning robot, and it is an extremely expensive process, involving hardware and software design, machine learning and vision and advanced programming techniques.