Duco: Autonomous Large-Scale Direct-Circuit-Writing (DCW) on Vertical Everyday Surfaces Using A Scalable Hanging Plotter
Tingyu Cheng, Bu Li, Yang Zhang, Yunzhi Li, Charles Ramey, Eui Min Jung, Yepu Cui, Sai Ganesh Swaminathan, Youngwook Do, Manos Tentzeris, Gregory Abowd, Hyunjoo Oh. (2021) ACM journal on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, (2022 Fast Company Innovation by Design Award Finalist)
Project Overview:
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.
Ubicomp 2021 paper video:
Ubicomp presentation video:
Duco Open Source
In order to further extend and validate the accessibility of Duco for HCI researchers and makers, we documented Duco’s design, assembly, and operation in our online repository: https://github.com/DUCO2020.