Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

There is growing interest in soft machines. Currently, they are designed by mimicking creatures, called the bionics approach. This DG program departs from the bionics approach. The fundamental idea in this DG program is based upon the philosophy of engineering design, namely, the design beginning with the specification of design requirements. The long-term objective of this DG program is to advance the computational design technology for soft machines with their applications in both manufacturing and healthcare systems. There are three specific objectives (SOs) for this DG program. SO-1: To develop a general-purpose synthesis methodology for a soft machine, which covers the whole design phase starting from the technical specification of design requirements to concept generation, and to final design development. SO-2: To develop a general-purpose motion analysis methodology for the automatic generation of the motion equation of a soft machine (under design) to enable the automatic evaluation of the design candidate against the design requirement. SO-3: To develop two application systems that include soft machines, i.e., the prosthetic hand and the wearable hand rehabilitation device, to demonstrate how the approach developed in SO-1 and SO-2 works and its benefits. By "general-purpose", it is meant that the methodology will be extendable to accommodate new types of soft machines. This DG program is expected to deliver a computational approach for the top-down design of soft machines, namely the design starting with the specification of design requirements. The approach will be implemented into two pieces of software: synthesis and analysis. The approach is built upon the generalization and extension of the topology optimization (TO) approach for designing compliant structures and mechanisms, specifically with several novel ideas: (1) using high-level components (e.g., bellow) instead of low-level elements (e.g., triangle) to mesh a design domain, (2) taking the design domain as an object, which can have geometry and properties and can move relative to the mesh, instead of an abstract rectangular region, and (3) characterizing a high-level component with parameters instead of its presence or absence in the design domain only. These ideas are highly original and novel in the context of the current literature. In the current literature, besides the bionics approach, the TO approach for soft machines is similar to the TO approach for compliant mechanisms (i.e., using elements to mesh a fixed rectangular region), and therefore this approach is limited in capturing design requirements and in representing soft machines. Soft machines have many applications in healthcare, space exploration, and rescue operation due to their inherent resilience and biocompatibility. These applications are very important to Canada. Therefore, the outcome from this DG program will no doubt have strong impact to the prosperity of Canada in the future 5-10 years onwards.