Professor Kazuhiro Saitou gave a keynote talk at the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (ASME IDETC/CIE) in Quebec City on August 26-29, 2018. His talk was titled “Obsessed with assembly: a bystander’s view of computational assembly design.”
Abstract: The world is full of assembled products. If you are a mechanical engineer, you must like LEGO™ in your childhood, or you still do. I liked it so much that I made my career out of it – research on assembly. This talk intends to give highlights of computational assembly design in an atypical view, and their relationship with the mainstream assembly research in mechanical engineering. I will present an overview of our past and recent research attempts towards self-assembling mechanical parts, massively parallel micro assembly, folding prediction for protein-ligand assembly, product-embedded disassembly (a.k.a. domino self-disassembly), manufacturability-driven assembly partitioning, and multi-component topology optimization and its application to 3D printed assemblies. Finally, I will discuss opportunities for future research on folding and assembly in “4D printed” structures.
Saitou is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his BS degree from the University of Tokyo, and his MS and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include algorithmic and computational design synthesis and design for manufacture and assembly, with applications in mechanical, industrial, and biomedical systems.
Saitou was the recipient of several awards including:
- Kos-Ishii Toshiba Award, ASME Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Technical Committee
- Innovative Design Component Award, ARPA-E Lightweighting Technologies Enabling Comprehensive Automotive Redesign (LITECAR) Challenge
- Design and Systems Division Achievement Award, Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
- CAREER Award, US National Science Foundation
- Best paper awards at international conferences
He has served as an Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering (JCISE), the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design (JMD), and the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE). Saitou is currently serving as an Associate Editor for JCISE and a Senior Editor for T-ASE. He was a past Chair of the ASME Design Automation Technical Committee (DAC) and the ASME Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Technical Committee (DFMLC), and the Editor-In-Chief for Conference Editorial Board of IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering. He is a Fellow of ASME and IEEE.
