Podcast: Ed Mehr & Machina's Robot Army Transform Manufacturing (Interview)

Farbod Moghaddam

fromThe Next Byte

29 Nov, 2023

Podcast: Ed Mehr & Machina's Robot Army Transform Manufacturing (Interview)

In this episode, we interview Edward Mehr, CEO of Machina Labs, the ambitious startup that's transforming the manufacturing scene one robot at a time.

automation

- manufacturing systems

- robotics

- swarm robotics

In this episode, we interview Edward Mehr, CEO of Machina Labs, the ambitious startup that's transforming the manufacturing scene one robot at a time.

EPISODE NOTES

LINKS:

Listen to Episode 118 - where we first covered Machina

Check out Machina's careers page

TIMESTAMPS;

(01:25) - how Ed’s nontraditional education equipped him to build startups

(08:29) - manufacturing challenges and the beginnings of agile manufacturing

(14:40) - why 3D printing was successful in the aerospace industry

(20:29) - using agile manufacturing to disrupt new industries

(23:44) - the “secret sauce” behind Machina’s technology

(34:31) - why AI robots will revolutionize sheet metal forming

(44:46) - the impact of next-gen AI-enabled robotic craftsmen

(50:21) - the future of Machina and Ed’s role as CEO

(60:28) - Ed’s advice for aspiring founders & technologists

As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

To learn more about this show, please visit our shows page. By following the page, you will get automatic updates by email when a new show is published. Be sure to give us a follow and review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and most of your favorite podcast platforms!

The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.

Reprogrammable materials selectively self-assemble

While automated manufacturing is ubiquitous today, it was once a nascent field birthed by inventors such as Oliver Evans, who is credited with creating the first fully automated industrial process, in flour mill he built and gradually automated in the late 1700s.

21 Oct, 2022

This article was first published on MIT News.

While automated manufacturing is ubiquitous today, it was once a nascent field birthed by inventors such as Oliver Evans, who is credited with creating the first fully automated industrial process, in flour mill he built and gradually automated in the late 1700s. The processes for creating automated structures or machines are still very top-down, requiring humans, factories, or robots to do the assembling and making.

However, the way nature does assembly is ubiquitously bottom-up; animals and plants are self-assembled at a cellular level, relying on proteins to self-fold into target geometries that encode all the different functions that keep us ticking. For a more bio-inspired, bottom-up approach to assembly, then, human-architected materials need to do better on their own. Making them scalable, selective, and reprogrammable in a way that could mimic nature’s versatility means some teething problems, though.

Now, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have attempted to get over these growing pains with a new method: introducing magnetically reprogrammable materials that they coat different parts with — like robotic cubes — to let them self-assemble. Key to their process is a way to make these magnetic programs highly selective about what they connect with, enabling robust self-assembly into specific shapes and chosen configurations.

The soft magnetic material coating the researchers used, sourced from inexpensive refrigerator magnets, endows each of the cubes they built with a magnetic signature on each of its faces. The signatures ensure that each face is selectively attractive to only one other face from all the other cubes, in both translation and rotation. All of the cubes — which run for about 23 cents — can be magnetically programmed at a very fine resolution. Once they're tossed int

Image: Researchers at MIT have made significant steps toward creating robots that could practically and economically assemble nearly anything, including things much larger than themselves, from vehicles to buildings to larger robots. The new system involves large, usable structures built from an array of tiny identical subunits called voxels (the volumetric equivalent of a 2-D pixel). Courtesy of the researchers

Flocks of assembler robots show potential for making larger structures

Researchers make progress toward groups of robots that could build almost anything, including buildings, vehicles, and even bigger robots.

David L Chandler

23 Nov, 2022

robotics

- swarm robotics

This article was first published on MIT News.

Researchers at MIT have made significant steps toward creating robots that could practically and economically assemble nearly anything, including things much larger than themselves, from vehicles to buildings to larger robots.

The new work, from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), builds on years of research, including recent studies demonstrating that objects such as a deformable airplane wing and a functional racing car could be assembled from tiny identical lightweight pieces — and that robotic devices could be built to carry out some of this assembly work. Now, the team has shown that both the assembler bots and the components of the structure being built can all be made of the same subunits, and the robots can move independently in large numbers to accomplish large-scale assemblies quickly.

The new work is reported in the journal Nature Communications Engineering, in a paper by CBA doctoral student Amira Abdel-Rahman, Professor and CBA Director Neil Gershenfeld, and three others.

A fully autonomous self-replicating robot assembly system capable of both assembling larger structures, including larger robots, and planning the best construction sequence is still years away, Gershenfeld says. But the new work makes important strides toward that goal, including working out the complex tasks of when to build more robots and how big to make them, as well as how to organize swarms of bots of different sizes to build a structure efficiently without crashing into each other.

As in previous experiments, the new system involves large, usable structures built from an array of tiny identical subunits called voxels (the volumetric equivalent of a 2-D pixel). But while earlier voxels were purely mechanical structural pieces, the team has now developed complex voxels that each can carry both power and data from one unit to the next. This could e

Podcast: Ed Mehr & Machina's Robot Army Transform Manufacturing (Interview)

In this episode, we interview Edward Mehr, CEO of Machina Labs, the ambitious startup that's transforming the manufacturing scene one robot at a time.

EPISODE NOTES

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EPISODE NOTES

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