It was again a successful conference for design engineers and researchers to gather together in Boston this year exchanging ideas and sharing their most recent work and discoveries. Good memories collected!

SiDi Lab had four students attended the conference this year and presented the following three papers:

• R. Stone, W. Zhou, E. Akleman, V. Krishnamurthy, Z. Sha, “Print as a Dance Duet: Communication Strategies for Collision-Free Arm-Arm Coordination in Cooperative Three-Dimensional Printing,” ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Boston, MA, Aug. 20-23, 2023.
• S. Chen, A. E. Bayrak, Z. Sha, “Multi-Agent Bayesian Optimization for Unknown Design Space Exploration,” ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Boston, MA, Aug. 20-23, 2023.
• P. Gavino, Y. Xiao, Y. Cui, W. Chen, Z. Sha, “Evolutionary Co-Mention Network Analysis via Social Media Mining,” ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Boston, MA, Aug. 20-23, 2023.

We were also glad to work with Dr. Kentaro Yaji’s group from Osaka University to report the work on multifidelity topology design at this year’s conference.

• T. Kii, K. Yaji, K. Fujita, Z. Sha, C. C. Seepersad, “Data-Driven Multifidelity Topology Design With a Latent Crossover Operation,” ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Boston, MA, Aug. 20-23, 2023.

We would like to take the opportunity to congratulate the following SiDi Lab members on receiving competitive awards from various activities organized at the conference.

• Ronnie Stone and Phillip Gavino: Runner-up for the 2023 ASME Hackathon
• Ronnie Stone: Computers and Information in Engineering 2023 Student Poster Session Award for the poster Toward Swarm Manufacturing: Developing a Multi-Robot Cooperative Framework for Complex Manufacturing Tasks.
• Siyu Chen: Top-10 Broadening Participation (B-Part) Poster Presentation at the ASME 35th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology for the poster Unknown Design Space Exploration using Multi-Agent Bayesian Optimization.

Lastly, I am very happy to see the reunion of ASME Hackathon Committee members and the growth of ASME Hackathon community. We look forward to the 2024 hackathon in Washington DC.

Congratulations to the following SiDi students on winning competitive and pretigous awards. Well-deserved!

Xingang Li: Philip C. and Linda L. Lewis Foundation Graduate Fellowship, awarded by the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin

Phillip Gavino: Travel Award, 2023 ASME Undergraduate Poster Session on Dynamics, Vibration & Acoustics, awarded by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Design Engineering Division (DED)

Phillip Gavino: Robert L. Mitchell Friend of Alec Excellence Fund Scholarship, awarded by the Cockrell School of Engineering, UT Austin

Siyu Chen: NSF Travel Award, The 2023 Frontiers in Design Representation (FinDeR) Summer School held at the University of Maryland, College Park, awarded by the National Science Foundation

Siyu Chen: Travel Award for Top-10 Abstracts, 2023 DTM Student Poster Session, awarded by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Design Theory and Methododology (DTM) Technical Committee

Ronnie Stone: Travel Award, The ASME-CIE Graduate Research Poster Session, awarded by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Computers and Information in Engineering Division (CIE)

Ronnie Stone: 2023 NSF SFF Registration Fee Waiver Award, The Thirty-Fourth Annual International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium

Vanishree Shanmugasundaram: Freshman Introduction to Research in Engineering (FIRE) Research Scholarship, awarded by the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, UT Austin

Pawornwan Thongmak, Graduate Dean’s Prestigious Fellowship Supplement, awarded by the Graduate School, UT Austin

SiDi students, Ronnie Stone and Cole Mensch, provided a fun lecture to the students at Kealing Middle School to show the application of robotics in manufacturing and how the design of complex robotic systems can impact our daily lives. They demonstrated SiDi’s recent resarech outcomes of the Swarm Manufacturing project to the students and had a insighful discussion and communication in the class. Enjoy some photos and videos taken by Kiersten Fernandez, our Outreach Program Coordinator in the Cockrell School’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office.

Dr. Sha was recently invited to participate in the Annual Summer Forum held by The Cooperative Mobility for Competitive Megaregions (CM²) consortium at UT Austin. The multidisciplinary view fostered by the center was fascinating, and it was exciting to see how researchers from different fields integrate theories to tackle some of the most challenging problems in complex urban systems and future smart cities and mobility.

SiDi Lab received funding from the Department of Transportation (DOT) through the CM² center to investigate the complex urban system and its expansion in the Texas Triangle of Dallas-Austin-Houston, one of the fastest-growing megaregions in the United States. In particular, the objective is to develop a complex network-based analysis framework in support of the investigation of the co-evolution of cross-system interactions (e.g., urban networks and transportation networks) in the Texas Triangle megaregion.

This semester (Spring 2023), I picked the course project topic of Drone Delivery System Design for ME 366J: Design Methodology. It is a challenging topic, and students did a fantastic job practicing the concepts and methods they learned from the classroom on Design Methodology, such as customer needs analysis, function modeling and decomposition, mind-mapping and 6-3-5 methods for brainstorming and ideation, design of experiments, design for X, etc. Enjoy a few videos shot during the project demonstration day below.

Our recent work on Cooperative Additive Manufacturing, A.K.A. Cooperative 3D Printing (C3DP) was featured by Journal of Mechanical Design. Check out the featured article here: What can ants teach us about making better factories? The preprint of this article can be downloaded here: Decentralized and Centralized Planning for Multi-Robot Additive Manufacturing.

Meanwhile, our paper “A Generative Approach for Scheduling Multi-Robot Cooperative Three-Dimensional Printing” is among the top 20 most accessed (downloaded and viewed) articles in the ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering in 2022.

It was a great pleasure to host our guest speaker, Jessa Parette, the Senior Director of Research, Strategy & Design Systems at Capital One, to share her insights into design thinking methodologies in product development and customer needs analysis. Students had a great time discussing the questions they were interested in about their design practices, and I was very happy to see they were eager to link the knowledge learned from the classroom to the real world.

Dr. Zhenghui Sha received the national-level award at the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference this month.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers held its annual International Design Engineering Technical Conference in St. Louis, Missouri.

Sha, assistant professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the Young Engineer Award, which recognizes a promising young investigator who is making outstanding contributions to the progress in the application of computers in engineering.

The ASME SEIKM Technical Committee and the ASME CIE Hackathon Committee co-organized this year’s SEIKM Panel on the topic of “The Role of Hackathon Mechanism in Promoting Data Science in Mechanical Engineering Research and Education: Perspectives from Academia and Industry.” This panellists are Zhenghui Sha (UT Austin), Yan Lu (NIST), Ye Wang (Autodesk), and Daniele Grandi (Autodesk). They discussed 1) the ways and mechanisms to build academia-industry relationships in providing ME students with practical data-driven engineering problems and hands-on experiences, 2) how to train the data-literate mechanical engineers that can harness the data revolution in different engineering fields, and 3) the connection/gaps between data science education in the classroom and data science applications in industry.

The motivation of the ASME Hackathon initiative is to support an engaging and inclusive platform for researchers to practice data-driven discovery and explore new statistical and machine-learning techniques appropriate for the use of unstructured data that would be beneficial to mechanical engineering, and developing pathways to train the data-literate mechanical engineers that can harness the data revolution in different engineering fields.

Three graduate students, Yinshuang Xiao, Xingang Li, and Daniel Weber, recently attended the 2022 IDETC/CIE conference in St. Louis, Missouri in person. Check their papers, posters and video presentations below.

Y. Xiao, F. Ahmed, Z. Sha, “Travel Links Prediction In Shared Mobility Networks Using Graph Neural Network Models,” ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, Aug. 14-17, 2022.

X. Li, Y. Wang, Z. Sha, “Deep Learning of Cross-Modal Tasks for Conceptual Design of Engineered Products: A Review,” ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, Aug. 14-17, 2022.

D. Weber, Z. Sha, “Z-Chunking for Cooperative 3D Printing of Large and Tall Objects,” CIE Graduate Research Poster Competition, ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, Aug. 14-17, 2022.

Some pictures taken during their presentations: