Aidan Leitch

I’m quite interested in finding new and exciting ways to use common robot parts. Solenoids are very simple electrical motors, but are not often used in robotics due to their lack of precision and short range of motion. In response, I’ve 3D printed a flexible mechanism that uses a solenoid to create a grabbing motion that can pick up small objects.

Thingiverse

“Print-in-place” 3D printing is the concept of having complex mechanisms with moving parts that can be manufactured as a single component. I applied this concept by 3D printing the entire mechanism of an articulated robotic hand. The body of the hand is printed as a single piece, and with the addition of a motor and some cables, the gripper can hold small objects up to one pound. This project won First Prize in the 2017 Instructables Robotics Contest.

Project Links:

Thingiverse

Instructables

Most 3D printed objects are made with a 2D infill pattern, a simple, repeating shape that fills the inside of the otherwise hollow print. For rigid prints, this adds strength, but when printing in flexible materials, the 2D infill pattern causes inconsistency in the final object’s elasticity. In this project, I experimented with a 3D infill pattern to optimize a 3D printed rubber ball for maximum bouncing.

Project Links:

Thingiverse

Hackaday.IO

Press:

3Ders

After creating a print-in-place gripper, the obvious next step was to create a crawling robot. The crawling robot has four legs, which it controls to move forward and backwards. Just like the gripper, the body of this robot is 3D printed as one part, making it extremely simple to build. The robot is made of a flexible rubber, and has a series of joints along its legs that it articulates with servo motors.

Press:

Adafruit Ask-An-Engineer

I love math, and love experimenting with its real world applications. So when I stumbled across the Wikipedia page of Jessen’s Orthogonal icosahedron, I just had to explore it. I reworked the shape in Autodesk Fusion 360 and 3D printed it. I discovered that when printed in a flexible filament, the Jessen’s Icosahedron can collapse on itself and become an octahedron.

Project Links:

Thingiverse

I developed an OpenSCAD script that can generate a mold for a custom gasket based on user parameters. The mold can then be 3D printed and casted with a silicone rubber.

Project Links:

Thingiverse

Instructables

I’m a huge fan of Buckminster Fuller and have always dreamed of building a geodesic dome. In this project, I used CAD and procedural design to create 3D printed connectors that allow for the construction of an arbitrarily-large 1V geodesic sphere.

One unique feature of FDM 3D printing is that other mediums and materials can be inserted into a print during fabrication. In this project, I used this ability to create a one-way air valve by adding a rubber stopper mid-print.

Project Links:

Thingiverse

Instructables

I was first exposed to the world of 3D design with Blender. Over the eight years that I’ve been using the program, I’ve created dozens of hypnotizing animations and beautiful 3D renders. Here are just a few of them.

Soft robotics is a budding subfield of robotics with the goal of creating robots from flexible and soft materials. There has been little research for sensors for such robots, so I developed a system of sensors for soft robots called Pneumatic Deformation Sensors (PDS). The system consists of an air bladder that can be integrated into a soft robot connected to small electronics board with a pressure sensor. When the robot bends, moves, or otherwise distorts, the board will detect a change in pressure, sensing deformation of the robot.

This project placed first in the 2016 Harvard Soft Robotics Toolkit High School Design Competition.

Project Links:

Soft Robotics Toolkit

Press:

Harvard SEAS News

Engineering.com

3D printers build objects by laying down very thin layers of plastic, usually at most .3mm high. But what if we 3D printed at greater layer heights? I experimented with printing at a layer height of 2mm! Ridiculous! I discovered that 3D printed objects exhibit very different properties when made with such a layer height.

Soft robotics is a subfield of robotics with the goal of creating robots from flexible and soft materials. Many soft robots are powered by air instead of electricity. Because air is more difficult to control, I created a number of programable air sources for soft robots. These allow for inflation, deflation, and coordinated control of robots.

Project Links:

Featured on Harvard’s Soft Robotics Toolkit

Thingiverse

Instructables

Hackaday.IO

Although soft robotics has incredible potential on its own, I believe it has the most promise when used in conjunction with hard robotics. In this project, I modified an existing robot arm with inflatable soft robotic gripper. This allows the arm to grasp and wider range of objects with different shapes and sizes.

Project Links:

Thingiverse

Instructables

Hackaday.IO

What if you could automate the creation of origami? With the power of a 3D printer, this concept is fully possible and opens doors for the creation of complex foldable devices that can transform their shape with a simple push.

Project Links:

Thingiverse

After seeing 3D Brooklyn’s recycling project, I was inspired to research recycling paper and cardboard with 3D printed molds. By shredding paper, soaking it in glue and water, and packing it into custom-designed molds, I was able to give new life to trashed paper and boxes.

The goal of this project was to create soft robotic actuators that are completely flat when unactivated. Using some clever casting techniques and parametric design, these actuators can be less than 4mm thick yet inflate to 10x their original size. These flat actuators can be used in interactive haptic surfaces and Braille display technology.

Project Links:

Thingiverse

Instructables

This was one of my first 3D printing projects. I like to use it as an example of what you can do with 3D printing with little experience. I created this as a project for my 7th grade biology teacher and published it online shortly after. The second image is by Claude Jordan, a science teacher at a school for the blind. Claude replicated my project in order to help his students feel what a virus looked like. I was honored to have helped these students’ education.

Thingiverse