On March 20th 2019, after more than two year’s collaborative efforts with Dr. Wenchao Zhou, an Assistant Professor from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the UA and the startup company AMBOTS, we made the world-first cooperatively 3D-printed part. It is the first time that multiple independent 3D printers work together to print a part with a size way bigger than the printer itself. This achievement is realized through our Swarm Printing concept and the cooperative 3D printing (C3DP) platform. The workpiece (a beehive structural beam) shown in the picture is approximately 840×70×20 mm in L×W×H. The workpiece in this size would be impossibly printed by any existing commercial desktop 3D printers. The C3DP platform is backed by several research methods and technologies developed by the team, including 3D printing robotics, chunk-based slicer, chunk bond strength testing, and automatic scheduling and path planning for chunk-based C3DP. Our vision is to establish an Autonomous Digital Additive Manufacturing (ADAM) system of the future. On March 21st, we demonstrated our research and technologies to the R&D group of ArcBest. See media coverage on our project here.

Our research on cooperative 3D printing, especially our recent efforts on developing a new computational framework for automatically generating scheduling strategies of coordinating a swarm of printing robots was recently highlighted by Research Frontiers at the University of Arkansas. This project is collaborated with Dr. Wenchao Zhou from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the UA and the startup company AMBOTS. Please see SiDi Publication and our previous post for details. The work has been also highlighted in several mainstream media of 3D printing industry, such as 3dprint.com, 3dprintingindustry.com, and all3dp. It was also recently listed as one of the five coolest things on the earth in the fourth week of May by GE reports.

SiDi Lab recently received a seed grant for initiating an industrial collaboration with Ford Motor Company. This grant is awarded by the Office of Research & Innovation at the University of Arkansas. We will collaborate with Ford Global Data, Insight & Analytics (GDIA) to establish a novel approach to modeling customer choice behaviors in electric vehicle (EV) market based on network theory. Particularly, we will investigate how well the network model performs in predicting customers’ choices in EV market as compared to existing choice modeling techniques, such as the Discrete Choice Model. 

The undergrad senior, Khoinguyen Trinh, was awarded an Honors College Research Grant for the Spring term. Khoi will use this grant to support his study on developing a new approach to engineering and designing artificial swarm systems with desired characteristics and performance based on the theory of network motifs.

Our paper titled “Modeling Participation Behaviors in Design Crowdsourcing Using A Bipartite Network-Based Approach” is accepted by The ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering on January 2nd.

Congratulations to senior mechanical engineering student, Colin Corcoran, for being selected as the recipient of the Student Integrated Intern Research Experience (SIIRE) Scholarship. This scholarship is sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and is designed to support students who are interested in pursuing research in academia and allows for students to spend more of their time working towards a research related goal.

Corcoran said, “I am honored to receive the National Science Foundation Student Integrated Intern Research Experience scholarship because it validates the work and progress of my research project. I have been working on the project for the past six months under the guidance of Dr. Sha and receiving the scholarship verifies not only that Dr. Sha values my work but also other professors around campus also value the time and effort I have put in to the project.”

Colin has been working in SiDi lab, as a research assistant, on the project related to better understanding the spatial heterogeneity of customer preferences and behaviors  in community-based digital manufacturing systems, such as the 3Dhubs.com.

The PhD student Laxmi Poudel attended The ASME 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, held in Quebec City, Canada from August 26-29. He received the ASME CIE Graduate Student Poster Travel Award to participate this venue and presented his preliminary studies on Autonomous and Cooperative Digital Manufacturing.

SiDi Lab recently received the EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct fundamental research into sequential decision making in engineering systems design. The primary objective of this high-risk high-reward project is to create and demonstrate a research approach centered on the acquisition and analysis of fine-grained design activity data for design research. The approach is based on an open-source research experiment platform extended from an existing computer-aided design (CAD) software, Energy3D, for renewable energy systems design. The subawardee, Dr. Charles Xie, from Concord Consortium will collaborate with Dr. Sha to 1) extend Energy3D to incorporate functionality required for a research platform, 2) demonstrate use of the new research platform to support the acquisition of fine-grained data from real-world design exercises, and 3) disseminate the platform within the engineering design research community through publications and tutorials. The research study will highlight how fine-grained data enables new research directions on sequential decision-making and system thinking, two fundamental elements of engineering design thinking. See the NSF website for more details about this project.

SiDi Lab has been working with AM3 Lab directed by Dr. Wenchao Zhou on developing the next-generation digital manufacturing systems through an integration of theories from swarm robotics, additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence and computer vision.  Our PhD student Laxmi Poudel will be in Quebec City next week to present our project on The ASME 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference.

Dr, Sha was invited by Dr. Charles Xie, the Senior Scientist from the Concord Consortium, and visited the CC from August 2-9. Dr. Sha introduced the current research projects of SiDi Lab to Dr. Xie, the President & CEO Mr. Chad Dorsey, and many other research staffs at the CC. Particularly, Dr. Sha introduced the project of Mining and Modeling Engineering Design Thinking Using Big Data Analytics, which has been conducted based on Energy3D – a smart CAD tool of renewable energy systems design invented by Dr. Xie. This visit has resulted in fruitful outcomes, including identification of future forms of collaboration, joint projects, new research proposal ideas and students co-advising mechanism. SiDi is very much looking forward a new year of success in collaborating with the CC.