Safety first

Back in the basement workshop, the club’s president, Sophia Ladyzhets BS’22, and Catherine “Calee” Schmidtberger BS’22, the club’s chief mechanical engineer, stand surrounded by car parts, from v-shaped suspension rods to the braking system to the hub and uprights assembly holding these components and the tires. The team has already run dozens of tests on each system, checking and double checking that all fail safes are in place and functional. The group has even created a full-sized model of the car’s front end to study how well it can withstand heavy impact.

Every aspect of the design process needs to be timed and executed with precision. Ben Felson BS’24, the team’s vice president of technical operations, pulls out an Excel spreadsheet containing a long list containing hundreds upon hundreds of FSAE rules about vehicle systems, subsystems, and subsystems for those subsystems.

“I have these little rules readings on the weekends where we literally go through and read each one, talk about it and what it’s about, then establish who is in charge of knowing it and when we reviewed it,” Felson said. Because the motor, high voltage battery pack, and other integral electrical components sit right behind the driver, “the rules are more high stakes for the EV because parts of the system can be a real danger to the driver if handled incorrectly.”

But the beating heart of any car is the motor, and, in an electric vehicle, that’s where things get particularly interesting. Hovering over the open accumulator, Partida described the internal functions of the car’s powertrain, from the battery pack, the relays and electronics to the motor controller and the electric motors, with surgeon-like detail. The battery pack is a layer cake of power, with each battery segment containing multiple clusters of cells. Members hope that those cells will take their car upwards of speeds of 120 kilometers per hour.

That’s not just about raw power; it’s also about engineering an incredibly effective use of it.

“The efficiency of the motor inverter [the EV component that converts direct current to alternating current] is upwards of 90%,” Schmidtberger said. “So the power efficiency is very high, especially compared to internal combustion cars, where the standard efficiency of an engine is around 35%.”

Indeed, it’s never as simple as taking the bones of a combustion car and swapping in a few electric parts.

“Our first iteration of this prototype used an old chassis, the old bones that were from an old internal combustion car,” Schmidtberger said. “In that case, several of our parts were wonky and ended up having a horrible shape that would have never worked. Our new chassis is designed to be an electric car that can fit the accumulator in the back to maintain a low center of gravity, preserving its handling capabilities.”

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A new generation of car designers

The push toward electric design had the side benefit of attracting a wide range of students, not just the stereotypical motorhead crowd of yesteryear, noted Professor of Mechanical Engineering Jeffrey Kysar, another of the club’s faculty advisors. “The refocus is attracting students not just from mechanical and electrical engineering, but from chemical, civil, and earth and environmental engineering—as well as from other schools and laboratories at Columbia such as the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory,” he said. (Test drives are conducted in the parking lot of Lamont-Doherty, thanks to its director Maureen Raymo.)

“Sustainability is a global problem that attracts everyone,” said Preindl.

Ladyzhets noted there have been several non-engineering students joining the club, such as Elaine Kharbanda ’24, the club’s vice president of business affairs and a linguistics student at Columbia College. At the competition, the team’s inclusivity efforts were recognized by General Motors’ “Everybody In” award, which is presented to the team that best reflected the company’s Everybody In campaign. As part of their prize, GM will cover the group’s registration fees for next year’s competition.

Browne added that the team’s diversity is starting to be reflected within the wider industry, citing GM’s own Mary Barra, who was named CEO in 2014. He also acknowledged Mary Boyce, now provost of the University, who ramped up funding for the club and also completely renovated the FSAE’s workshop back when she was dean of the engineering school. Browne said it was her interest in FSAE that made the transition to EV possible. 

Transitions are much on the minds of club members, as summer marks the end of another academic year. Ladzyzhets is pursuing her integrated master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Columbia, and is planning for an upcoming internship with Tesla. Schmidtberger, on the other hand, wants to follow her childhood dream and build energy-efficient amusement park rides, or also get involved in other sustainable projects.

But most importantly, the legacy they want to leave behind is one of inclusivity, where everyone can feel like they’re building the future together.

“With the electric car, we’ve tried to make it a lot more welcoming—there’s no experience needed—we don’t do interviews, and we’re trying to put a lot more work into our teaching and mentorship,” Ladyzhets said. “We’re all trying to figure out these problems together, and that’s the most important thing.”

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have demonstrated a highly dexterous robot hand, one that combines an advanced sense of touch with motor learning algorithms in order to achieve a high level of dexterity. 

As a demonstration of skill, the team chose a difficult manipulation task: executing an arbitrarily large rotation of an unevenly shaped grasped object in hand while always maintaining the object in a stable, secure hold. This is a very difficult task because it requires constant repositioning of a subset of fingers, while the other fingers have to keep the object stable. Not only was the hand able to perform this task, but it also did it without any visual feedback whatsoever, based solely on touch sensing. 

In addition to the new levels of dexterity, the hand worked without any external cameras, so it's immune to lighting, occlusion, or similar issues. And the fact that the hand does not rely on vision to manipulate objects means that it can do so in very difficult lighting conditions that would confuse vision-based algorithms--it can even operate in the dark.

“While our demonstration was on a proof-of-concept task, meant to illustrate the capabilities of the hand, we believe that this level of dexterity will open up entirely new applications for robotic manipulation in the real world,” said Matei Ciocarlie, associate professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. “Some of the more immediate uses might be in logistics and material handling, helping ease up supply chain problems like the ones that have plagued our economy in recent years, and in advanced manufacturing and assembly in factories.”

Leveraging optics-based tactile fingers

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In earlier work, Ciocarlie’s group collaborated with Ioannis Kymissis, professor of electrical engineering, to develop a new generation of optics-based tactile robot fingers. These were the first robot fingers to achieve contact localization with sub-millimeter precision while providing complete coverage of a complex multi-curved surface. In addition, the compact packaging and low wire count of the fingers allowed for easy integration into complete robot hands. 

Teaching the hand to perform complex tasks

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For this new work, led by CIocarlie’s doctoral researcher, Gagan Khandate, the researchers designed and built a robot hand with five fingers and 15 independently actuated joints--each finger was equipped with the team’s touch-sensing technology. The next step was to test the ability of the tactile hand to perform complex manipulation tasks. To do this, they used new methods for motor learning, or the ability of a robot to learn new physical tasks via practice. In particular, they used a method called deep reinforcement learning, augmented with new algorithms that they developed for effective exploration of possible motor strategies. 

Robot completed approximately one year of practice in only hours of real-time

The input to the motor learning algorithms consisted exclusively of the team’s tactile and proprioceptive data, without any vision. Using simulation as a training ground, the robot completed approximately one year of practice in only hours of real-time, thanks to modern physics simulators and highly parallel processors. The researchers then transferred this manipulation skill trained in simulation to the real robot hand, which was able to achieve the level of dexterity the team was hoping for. Ciocarlie noted that “the directional goal for the field remains assistive robotics in the home, the ultimate proving ground for real dexterity. In this study, we've shown that robot hands can also be highly dexterous based on touch sensing alone. Once we also add visual feedback into the mix along with touch, we hope to be able to achieve even more dexterity, and one day start approaching the replication of the human hand.”

Ultimate goal: joining abstract intelligence with embodied intelligence

Ultimately, Ciocarlie observed, a physical robot being useful in the real world needs both abstract, semantic intelligence (to understand conceptually how the world works), and embodied intelligence (the skill to physically interact with the world). Large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google’s PALM aim to provide the former, while dexterity in manipulation as achieved in this study represents complementary advances in the latter.

For instance, when asked how to make a sandwich, ChatGPT will type out a step-by-step plan in response, but it takes a dexterous robot to take that plan and actually make the sandwich. In the same way, researchers hope that physically skilled robots will be able to take semantic intelligence out of the purely virtual world of the Internet, and put it to good use on real-world physical tasks, perhaps even in our homes.

The paper has been accepted for publication at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (Daegu, Korea, July 10-14, 2023), and is currently available as a preprint.

ABOUT THE STUDY

CONFERENCE: Science and Systems Conference (Daegu, Korea, July 10-14, 2023)

STUDY: "Sampling-based Exploration for Reinforcement Learning of Dexterous Manipulation”

AUTHORS: Authors are all from Columbia Engineering: Gagan Khandate and Tristan Luca Saidi (Computer Science), Siqi Shang, Eric Chang, Johnson Adams, and Matei Ciocarlie (Mechanical Engineering). The tactile sensors were developed in collaboration with Ioannis Kymissis (Electrical Engineering).

FUNDING: This work was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research grant N00014-21-1-4010 and the National Science Foundation grant CMMI-2037101.

The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.

Addressing food printing challenges

Food printing technology has existed since Lipson’s lab first introduced it in 2005, but to date the technology has been limited to a small number of uncooked ingredients, resulting in what many perceive as less than appetizing dishes. Blutinger’s team broke away from this limitation by printing a dish comprising seven ingredients, cooked in situ using a laser. For the paper, the researchers designed a 3D-printing system that constructs cheesecake from edible food inks — including peanut butter, Nutella, and strawberry jam. The authors note that precision printing of multi-layered food items could produce more customizable foods, improve food safety, and enable users to control the nutrient content of meals more easily. 

“Because 3D food printing is still a nascent technology, it needs an ecosystem of supporting industries such as food cartridge manufacturers, downloadable recipe files, and an environment in which to create and share these recipes. Its customizability makes it particularly practical for the plant-based meat market, where texture and flavor need to be carefully formulated to mimic real meats,” Blutinger said.

To demonstrate the potential of 3D food printing, the team tested various cheesecake designs, consisting of seven key ingredients: graham cracker, peanut butter, Nutella, banana puree, strawberry jam, cherry drizzle, and frosting. They found that the most successful design used a graham cracker as the foundational ingredient for each layer of the cake. Peanut butter and Nutella proved to be best used as supporting layers that formed “pools” to hold the softer ingredients: banana and jam. Multi-ingredient designs evolved into multi-tiered structures that followed similar principles to building architectures; more structural elements were needed to support softer substrates for a successful multi-ingredient layered print.

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Is 3D food printing healthy?

“We have an enormous problem with the low-nutrient value of processed foods,” Cooper said. “3D food printing will still turn out processed foods, but perhaps the silver lining will be, for some people, better control and tailoring of nutrition--personalized nutrition. It may also be useful in making food more appealing to those with swallowing disorders by mimicking the shapes of real foods with the pureed texture foods that these patients--millions in the U.S. alone--require.”

The potential of 3D food-printing

Laser cooking and 3D food printing could allow chefs to localize flavors and textures on a millimeter scale to create new food experiences. People with dietary restrictions, parents of young children, nursing home dieticians, and athletes alike could find these personalized techniques very useful and convenient in planning meals. And, because the system uses high-energy targeted light for high-resolution tailored heating, cooking could become more cost-effective and more sustainable. 

“The study also highlights that printed food dishes will likely require novel ingredient compositions and structures, due to the different way by which the food is ‘assembled,’ ” said Lipson. “Much work is still needed to collect data, model, and optimize these processes.”

Blutinger added, “And, with more emphasis on food safety following the COVID-19 pandemic, food prepared with less human handling could lower the risk of foodborne illness and disease transmission. This seems like a win-win concept for all of us.”

About the Study

JOURNAL: npj Science of Food

STUDY: “The Future of Software-Controlled Cooking”

AUTHORS: Jonathan David Blutinger (1, Christen Cupples Cooper (2), Shravan Karthik(1), Alissa Tsai (1), Noa Samarelli (1), Erika Storvick (1), Gabriel Seymour (1), Elise Liu (1), Yoran Meijers (1,3) and Hod Lipson (1)

1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia Engineering
2. Department of Nutrition and Dietetics, Pace University
3. Department of Food Technology, Wageningen University, Netherlands.
    

FUNDING:  The study was supported by NSF AI Institute for Dynamical Systems, grant 2112085, and by a grant from the Redefine Meat Ltd.

The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.