About the Lab

Hi everyone, thanks for your interest in the Matter Assembly Computation Lab! Our research in the MACLab is motivated by the observation that designing robots, and electromechanical systems, is difficult, time-consuming, and requires a great deal of experience. Practitioners need to be skilled in mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering. Instead, what if making a robot could be as easy as specifying the behaviors or capabilities you want, asking software tools to design the robot, and then printing the robot? This is the overall inspiration for what we’re trying to do in the MACLab.

In support of this general goal we work in several research subareas:

Design automation for multimaterial fabrication
Multimaterial simulation
Fabrication automation (which involves making new 3D printers and control software)
3D-printable material development and testing

news

Feb 22, 2024	Lawrence appears on Broncos talk radio to discuss how the lab’s research on impact mitigation could be applied to create better sports safety equipment! Listen here.
Jan 20, 2024	Lawrence and Rob publish research on tunable metamaterials for impact mitigation in Advanced Materials Technologies! Read more here.
Jan 05, 2024	Lawrence and Rob publish a method for creating multiphase composite materials using inkjet printing in Advanced Materials! Read more here!
Oct 09, 2023	Charles’s paper, Determining Optimal Print Orientation Using GPU-Accelerated Convex Hull Analysis, was published at SCF ‘23: Symposium on Computational Fabrication! Check the paper out here. This work was implemented into the open-source Oak Ridge National Laboratory Slicer 2 project.
Feb 10, 2023	Lawrence’s brief communication on mechanical characterization and constitutive modeling of 3d-printable soft materials is accepted in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing!