Design and Innovation for the Robot World

A large com­pa­ny. A team of col­lege stu­dents. A kid in a garage. All of these peo­ple can be robot design­ers. It takes inno­va­tion, cre­ativ­i­ty, and moti­va­tion to design and cre­ate robots, but this job can be tack­led by just about anyone.

One robot design­er, Josh Nizzi, offers an instruc­tion­al DVD for pur­chase in which he reveals his tech­niques for design­ing robots. He walks the audi­ence through the entire robot­ic design process, as he sketch­es con­cepts in Pho­to­shop and cre­ates a 3D mod­el in 3ds Max. His designs were put into pro­duc­tion for the movie Trans­form­ers 2.

David Han­son is a robot design­er that devel­ops robots with real­is­tic facial expres­sions and con­ver­sa­tion­al abil­i­ties. He worked at Walt Dis­ney Imag­i­neer­ing before found­ing Han­son Robot­ics. His walk­ing humanoid, a por­trait of Albert Ein­stein, was designed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with KAIST Hubo Group.

Robot design­ers use soft­ware pro­grams to aid in design. Rang­ing from CAD draw­ing pro­grams to mechan­i­cal sim­u­la­tion pro­grams, soft­ware enables the user to design accord­ing to his abil­i­ty. Auto­CAD turns a rough sketch into a pro­fes­sion­al draw­ing stan­dard­ized for read­abil­i­ty. Solid­Works is a new­er way to draw parts and machines, where parts are built in 3D, put togeth­er in an assem­bly, and then the soft­ware gen­er­ates the 2D drawings. 

Vex Robot­ics Design Sys­tem pro­motes com­pe­ti­tions for young stu­dents to design inno­v­a­tive robots. Stu­dents form groups with men­tors like their teach­ers, and will attempt to design robots to obtain points. Com­pe­ti­tion events are held in many dif­fer­ent cities, so the teams can trav­el to com­pete against oth­er teams.

Robot design­ers must con­stant­ly work to find the best design avail­able for their par­tic­u­lar tasks. Social robot design­ers con­duct­ed an exper­i­ment to test the social behav­iors in robots towards dogs. Using the Peo­ple­Bot robot, the dog was told where hid­den food was in the room. The results of the exper­i­ment proved that the dogs react­ed most pos­i­tive­ly toward humans, but they also react­ed pos­i­tive­ly to the robots on the social set­ting. When the robot was in its reg­u­lar robot­ic state, the dogs did not respond or find the food. Social robot design­ers have proof that the social func­tion in their designs is apparent.

Robot design­ers strive to cre­ate machines that accom­plish the nec­es­sary tasks. Robots​.com is an indus­tri­al robot inte­gra­tor that ful­ly appre­ci­ates robot design­ers. With­out them, com­pa­nies like ours would not exist and oth­er com­pa­nies would not be as effi­cient as they are now. If you are inter­est­ed in incor­po­rat­ing an indus­tri­al robot, con­tact us today online or at 877−762−6881.