Watch Jacob Segil, CEO of Afference and research professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, showcase a new piece of haptic technology in an episode of Freethink's Hard Reset docuseries that will "redraw the borders of reality."

Off

Off

Off

Off

Off

Off

Off

At the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, the process and application of design is everywhere.

Students are constantly designing tools and technologies. Faculty members are launching successful startups on the backs of their own designs. In just the past two years, Venture Partners at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder has supported 10 new startups featuring inventions designed by ME faculty and students.

But earlier this fall, the department took nearly a decade of development to a whole new level by introducing a new research area in design. This focus area, geared toward PhD students, involves the study of the design process and how various contexts (environmental, psychological, political, etc.) affect the artifacts that today’s engineers aim to create.

It’s the next step in the department’s design growth, building on the current MS design framework and the large network of undergraduate design courses made possible by Design Center ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ. ME faculty and staff have worked tirelessly over the years to build this infrastructure and weave elements of design throughout all the other focus areas in the department. The new design PhD focus area represents the next iteration.

Grace Burleson, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, was a key player, among others, in the creation of this new concentration. She believes the focus area will help ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder researchers enhance the practice of design, and advance design methodologies throughout many engineering disciplines to tackle the difficult societal challenges we see today.

“Design has been happening in the department since the beginning. It’s embedded in mechanical engineering and our other focus areas,” Burleson said. “However, that framing makes it challenging to focus on design as a scientific study.

“Our engineers are being asked to solve much more complex issues than ever before, and we need to expand our thought of design in order to be successful.”

From interdisciplinary beginnings

Grace Burleson, assistant professor in mechanical engineering. Burleson is one of over 20 faculty members affiliated with the new design focus area.

The inspiration behind Burleson's research can be traced all the way back to summer 2015, nearly 8,517 miles away from Boulder.

Burleson, at the time an undergraduate student at Oregon State University, was on a research trip in Uganda studying global health and sustainable development. While conducting her research, she quickly realized that her typical engineer’s rationale was not enough to foster successful design processes. An understanding of social contexts and a whole new perspective was needed in order to do her work the right way.

From there, a whole new spark of curiosity was formed. A spark that led Burleson down a dual path threading the needle between mechanical engineering and anthropology. She studied the two areas and applied principles from each to her own work until she found a true relationship: the impact of design.

“Applied sciences have always been a pillar of design in engineering, and they always will be,” Burleson said. “But I learned that we have to broaden the scope of sciences that we are using to design our artifacts. There are cultural considerations we need to understand in order to find the effective and equitable solutions to our design problems.”

After receiving her PhD from the University of Michigan, Burleson’s next project was finding a home that allowed her to foster the next great design minds. She joined ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, whose interdisciplinary approach and faculty support made it easy for her to make her mark.

“Design has been a strong focus in our department long before I joined, and I received strong  encouragement from other faculty members to start the process for formalizing the focus area,” Burleson said. “I met with faculty who led design research, and we all agreed that we needed to do this.”

To the first iteration

Nicole Xu, assistant professor in mechanical engineering, showcasing her lab's bio-inspired design for robotic jellyfish.

The Design Focus Area launched in fall 2024 with over 20 faculty members from very diverse backgrounds. Some faculty members tackle design questions in the areas of air quality and sustainability. Others practice design through the lens of materials and mechanics.

This interdisciplinary structure is a staple in the field of design, which Burleson calls a “horizontal discipline.” While other focus areas might require in-depth, vertical research into one topic, design requires a wide range of knowledge in a handful of topics. It’s a holistic approach that invites students with diverse backgrounds who are looking to study design.

“When I’m recruiting PhD students, I’m looking for those diverse backgrounds,” Burleson said. “We have students from mechanical engineering, physics, even theater and law. It really lends a unique perspective to the focus area.”

Even the current research that faculty and students are conducting is multi-dimensional and exciting. Nicole Xu, another assistant professor in mechanical engineering, focuses on biology-inspired design elements for robotic mechanisms.  creates aquatic vehicles that mimic the movements of live organisms for environmental monitoring.

“Engineering is often seen as a purely logical field, but we need to think more broadly about other aspects of design,” Xu said. “In my work, we apply design principles from animals to improve or expand our available underwater technologies. For other faculty, the perspective  could be the emotional contexts of design science, like teamwork and collaboration.

“Design is already inherent in every engineering project, with all the different types of research in our department. But it’s never been brought to the forefront like it is now with this new focus area.”

On to the next evolution

James Harper, assistant teaching professor in mechanical engineering.

Burleson says the focus area will continue to expand as engineers apply and advance new sciences. She also mentions rumors of an increased emphasis on design practice and research across campus to leverage the university’s vast consortium of design expertise.

Assistant Teaching Professor James Harper echoes those same sentiments, saying there is ample opportunity to enhance the curriculum going forward. He even says that prospective PhD students have the opportunity as they are here to leave their mark on the department, and change the way design is taught college-wide based on their research.

“Engineers are not taught to talk to people,” Harper said. “We’re taught the technical side of things. But design relies on engineers understanding people and how products are actually used. Good design requires gathering contextual data, as well as entrepreneurial skills, and we’ve begun to teach these topics even in undergraduate engineering courses, too.”

One of Burleson’s design-track PhD students, Mark Henderson, recognizes the impact he could have on future generations. As a patent attorney, Henderson has seen lots of creators receive patent rejections on their inventions because their designs were “too similar” to others.

His research in the focus area revolves around one question: what design choices would engineers make if they already knew the “state of the art”?

“Here at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder, I have the opportunity to use these classes and this community for design research,” Henderson said. “But there is also potential in the broader Boulder area to do industry research with the large companies that are here.

“I really couldn’t believe the fit when I chose to study design at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder.”

Off

Olivia Felton is a PhD student in the Welker Lab, led by Assistant Professor Cara Welker, at the University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder. Their main focus: to use assistive technology to help both able-bodied individuals and those with disabilities.

Felton earned her Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Baylor University. During her time as an undergraduate, she worked in a fluids lab. While she found the research interesting, she knew it was not what she wanted to study long term.

Currently, her work focuses on recreational runners. In her experiments, participants run on a force instrumented treadmill, which tracks their ground reaction forces. They also wear a metabolic mask to measure energy expenditure during running. The running is slightly different than what they are used to, however, since they have an exotendon attached to their feet.

The exotendon is surgical tubing with loops on both ends held in place with zip ties and s-biners to clip onto the shoes of the person being tested. It creates a force between the individual's feet as the tubing stretches and molds as they run. Dr. Welker’s research has shown that the exotendon allows a runner to expend about six percent less metabolic energy when running at a 10 minute mile pace.

Moving forward, Felton is expanding the study by understanding the effect of running with the exotendon at a range of speeds and how reducing metabolic energy expenditure affects self-selected running speed.

Throughout her research, Felton has found she enjoys working with the many different people who come through her lab.

“One really cool thing about this study is that we're recruiting recreational runners, so I do a lot of run clubs around Boulder to recruit participants. I've met a lot of really great people,” Felton shared.

Off

One thousand feet underground, a four-legged creature scavenges through tunnels in pitch darkness. With vision that cuts through the blackness, it explores a spider web of paths, remembering its every step and navigating with precision. The sound of its movements echo eerily off the walls, but it is not to be feared – this is no wild animal; it is an autonomous rescue robot.

Initially designed to find survivors in collapsed mines, caves, and damaged buildings, that is only part of what it can do.

Created by a team of University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder researchers and students, the robots placed third as the top US entry and earned $500,000 in prize money at a Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency Subterranean Challenge competition in 2021.

Going Futher

Two years later, they are pushing the technology even further, earning new research grants to expand the technology and create new applications in the rapidly growing world of autonomous systems.

“Ideally you don’t want to put humans in harm’s way in disaster situations like mines or buildings after earthquakes; the walls or ceilings could collapse and maybe some already have,” said Sean Humbert, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Robotics Program at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder. “These robots can be disposable while still providing situational awareness.”

The team developed an advanced system of sensors and algorithms to allow the robots to function on their own – once given an assignment, they make decisions autonomously on how to best complete it.

Advanced Communication

A major goal is to get them from engineers directly into the hands of first responders. Success requires simplifying the way the robots transmit data into something approximating plain English, according to Kyle Harlow, a computer science PhD student.

“The robots communicate in pure math. We do a lot of work on top of that to interpret the data right now, but a firefighter doesn’t have that kind of time,” Harlow said.

To make that happen Humbert is collaborating with Chris Heckman, an associate professor of computer science, to change both how the robots communicate and how they represent the world. The robots’ eyes – a LiDAR sensor – creates highly detailed 3D maps of an environment, 15 cm at a time. That’s a problem when they try to relay information – the sheer amount of data clogs up the network.

“Humans don’t interpret the environment in 15 cm blocks,” Humbert said. “We’re now working on what’s called semantic mapping, which is a way to combine contextual and spatial information. This is closer to how the human brain represents the world and is much less memory intensive.”

High Tech Mapping

The team is also integrating new sensors to make the robots more effective in challenging environments. The robots excel in clear conditions but struggle with visual obstacles like dust, fog, and snow. Harlow is leading an effort to incorporate millimeter wave radar to change that.

“We have all these sensors that work well in the lab and in clean environments, but we need to be able to go out in places such as ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ where it snows sometimes,” Harlow said.

Where some researchers are forced to suspend work when a grant ends, members of the subterranean robotics team keep finding new partners to push the technology further.

Autonomous Flight

Eric Frew, a professor of aerospace at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder, is using the technology for a new National Institute of Standards and Technology competition to develop aerial robots – drones – instead of ground robots, to autonomously map disaster areas indoors and outside.

“Our entry is based directly on the Subterranean Challenge experience and the systems developed there,” Frew said.

Some teams in the competition will be relying on drones navigated by human operators, but Frew said ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder’s project is aiming for an autonomous solution that allows humans to focus on more critical tasks.

Although numerous universities and private businesses are advancing autonomous robotic systems, Humbert said other organizations often focus on individual aspects of the technology. The students and faculty at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder are working on all avenues of the systems and for uses in environments that present extreme challenges.

“We’ve built world-class platforms that incorporate mapping, localization, planning, coordination – all the high level stuff, the autonomy, that’s all us,” Humbert said. “There are only a handful of teams across the world that can do that. It’s a huge advantage that ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder has.”

Off