Duco: Large-Scale Circuit Drawing, 2020-2021
Tingyu Cheng, Bu Li, Yang Zhang, Yunzhi Li, Charles Ramey, Eui Min Jung, Yepu Cui, Sai Ganesh Swaminathan, Youngwook Do, Manos Tentzeris, Gregory D. Abowd, HyunJoo Oh
Duco: Autonomous Large-Scale Direct-Circuit-Writing (DCW) on Vertical Everyday Surfaces Using A Scalable Hanging Plotter, IMWUT 2021: DOI PDF
Fast Company’s 2022 Innovation by Design Awards: Student Finalist (Tingyu Cheng)
Human environments are filled with large open spaces that are separated by structures like walls, facades, glass windows, etc. Most often, these structures are largely passive offering little to no interactivity. In this paper, we present Duco, a large-scale electronics fabrication robot that enables room-scale & building-scale circuitry to add interactivity to vertical everyday surfaces. Duco negates the need for any human intervention by leveraging a hanging robotic system that automatically sketches multi-layered circuity to enable novel large-scale interfaces. The key idea behind Duco is that it achieves single-layer or multi-layer circuit fabrication on 2D surfaces as well as 2D cutouts that can be assembled into 3D objects by loading various functional inks (e.g., conductive, dielectric, or cleaning) to the wall-hanging drawing robot, as well as employing an optional laser cutting head as a cutting tool.
