Led by Professor Stefanie Mueller, the HCI Engineering Group’s long-term vision is that in the future anybody will be able to create anything anywhere anytime. Working towards this goal, they build novel hardware and software systems that advance personal fabrication technologies.
InfraredTags: Embedding Invisible AR Markers and Barcodes Using Low-Cost, Infrared-Based 3D Printing and Imaging Tools
Mustafa Doga Dogan, Ahmad Taka, Michael Lu, Yunyi Zhu, Akshat Kumar, Aakar Gupta, Stefanie Mueller
Existing approaches for embedding unobtrusive tags inside 3D objects require either complex fabrication or high-cost imaging equipment. We present InfraredTags, which are 2D markers and barcodes imperceptible to the naked eye that can be 3D printed as part of objects, and detected rapidly by low-cost near-infrared cameras. We achieve this by printing objects from an infrared-transmitting filament, which infrared cameras can see through, and by having air gaps inside for the tag’s bits, which appear at a different intensity in the infrared image.
EIT-kit: An Electrical Impedance Tomography Toolkit for Health and Motion Sensing
Junyi Zhu, Jackson C. Snowden, Joshua Verdejo, Emily Chen, Paul Zhang, Hamid Ghaednia, Joseph H. Schwab, Stefanie Mueller
In this paper, we propose EIT-kit, an electrical impedance tomography toolkit for designing and fabricating health and motion sensing devices. EIT-kit contains (1) an extension to a 3D editor for personalizing the form factor of electrode arrays and electrode distribution, (2) a customized EIT sensing motherboard for performing the measurements, (3) a microcontroller library that automates signal calibration and facilitates data collection, and (4) an image reconstruction library for mobile devices for interpolating and visualizing the measured data. Together, these EIT-kit components allow for applications that require 2- or 4-terminal setups, up to 64 electrodes, and single or multiple (up to four) electrode arrays simultaneously.
ElectroVoxel: Electromagnetically Actuated Pivoting for Scalable Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robots
Martin Nisser, Leon Cheng, Yashaswini Makaram, Ryo Suzuki, Stefanie Mueller
This paper introduces a cube-based reconfigurable robot that utilizes an electromagnet-based actuation framework to reconfigure in three dimensions via pivoting. While a variety of actuation mechanisms for self-reconfigurable robots have been explored, they often suffer from cost, complexity, assembly and sizing requirements that prevent scaled production of such robots. To address this challenge, we use an actuation mechanism based on electromagnets embedded into the edges of each cube to interchangeably create identically or oppositely polarized electromagnet pairs, resulting in repulsive or attractive forces, respectively.
Lenticular Objects: 3D Printed Objects with Lenticular Lens Surfaces That Can Change their Appearance Depending on the Viewpoint
Jiani Zeng, Honghao Deng, Yunyi Zhu, Michael Wessely, Axel Kilian, Stefanie Mueller
In this paper, we present a method that makes 3D objects appear differently under different viewpoints. We accomplish this by 3D printing lenticular lenses across the curved surface of objects. By calculating the lens distribution and the corresponding surface color patterns, we can determine which appearance is shown to the user at each viewpoint. We built a 3D editor that takes as input the 3D model, and the visual appearances, i.e. images, to show at different viewpoints. Our 3D editor then calculates the corresponding lens placements and underlying color pattern. On export, the user can use ray tracing to live preview the resulting appearance from each angle. The 3D model, color pattern, and lenses are then 3D printed in one pass on a multi-material 3D printer to create the final 3D object.