• Question: What was the toughest problem you had to deal with so far?

    Asked by jnr engineer 5891 to Tom, Sanjeev, Orla, Fiona, Eimear, Cillian on 3 Mar 2020. This question was also asked by five022ace.
    • Photo: Fiona Malone

      Fiona Malone answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      The last robot I had to build had to mimic a human oesophagus (food tube) and the swallowing motion called peristalsis. The human oesophagus works by squeezing the food to the stomach, kind of like squeezing toothpaste from a tube of toothpaste. This was a very difficult motion to replicate and to make the materials move in the way a human oesophagus does. We had problems with materials, the pumps, the code – everything! That’s the challenge of my job, trying to replicate things in nature and the human body using man made materials and robotics. There’s a relatively new type of robotics called soft robotics which is really useful when working with difficult problems like this – check it out and let me know what you think!

    • Photo: Orla McGee

      Orla McGee answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      Recently, I’ve been working on making a 3D printed a metal stent (a device used to open arteries that are struggling to let blood flow through them) that is quite flexible. Usually, 3D parts are quite stiff so trying to make one that is flexible and require a lot of design changes and overcoming a lot of challenges that arose due to the 3D printing process.
      I only got the new flexible stents successfully printed last week so I’m very proud of that work.

    • Photo: Eimear O'Hara

      Eimear O'Hara answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      Right now it’s actually using a computer to design what I want. I can picture it so clearly in my head but actually getting a computer to recreate has been a big challenge

    • Photo: Cillian Thompson

      Cillian Thompson answered on 5 Mar 2020:

      So far it has been trying to find a way to combine materials inside the 3D printer and then for the printer to produce the part that I want that is strong and able to disappear (biodegrade).

    • Photo: Sanjeev Kumar

      Sanjeev Kumar answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      In my work, first, I need to do computer simulations of a design before it goes for the fabrication. The next step is to take the measurements of the fabricated design. We expect a good agreement between simulated and measured results.
      However, when I simulated my first antenna (it took me about 6 months) for a wristwatch device, I was not able to achieve a good agreement between simulated and measured results. It was very disappointing, and I had to repeat the whole process. However, I succeeded in the second attempt.

Comments