Research Themes

RA 01: Development Process, Informatics, AI

The processes followed for carrying out design and manufacturing, and informatics associated with these processes, including the application of Artificial Intelligence, play significant roles in innovation of products and manufacturing systems. For example, novelty is a major aspect of designs created, which can be significantly enhanced with AI-based biomimetic tools that can help ideate with inspiration from nature. Idea-Inspire is one such leading tool developed at DM that enhanced ideation fluency by a factor of three for engineers.

Typical research topics pursued at DM in this theme are enlisted below.

Design Synthesis and creativity, Requirements engineering, design methodology, design research methodology, knowledge and life cycle management; Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) in product design, blast protection simulation; Ontology modelling; spatial conflict resolution, behavior modelling; Digital signal processing and image processing for driving safety; New Product Development (NPD), Building Information Modelling (BIM), framework for BIM as a collaboration platform; Object detection in the wild; Virtual Reality (VR) digital twin for person detection model validation and synthetic dataset generation; Deep Learning Methods for Robots in Industry 4.0.

RA 02: Human Factors, Aesthetics

Human factors play a significant role in design and manufacturing. Products and manufacturing systems are developed for interaction with stakeholders who have various physical and cognitive abilities and constraints and have aesthetic sensibilities that are tempered by both innate interests and the context. Work in this theme focuses on all aspects of design and manufacturing in which humans are involved, to supports the human factors and aesthetics during the whole product life cycle. For instance, many products have user interfaces, and have to interact with the user in a functional, aesthetic, and usable manner. The specific sub-areas of research include usability engineering, digital human modelling, clinical and rehabilitative engineering, and developing UI/UX guidelines and tools and new modalities of interaction that can significantly enhance the human factors performance of products. Tools are also being developed to predict and test human performance during manufacturing and usage of products, e.g. assessment and improvement of design for assembly.

Typical topics in this theme are enlisted below:

UI/UX design: eye gaze controlled Multi-Function Display (MFD) and Head Mounted Display system (HMDS), eye gaze controlled virtual and real flight simulators, designing the interior crew cabin of India’s maiden Human Space Flight Program; Digital Human Modelling (DHM), Haptics and Prosthesis, Computerized Ergonomics with Digital Human Modelling; high-fidelity haptic stimulus generation, psychophysics and sensory-physiology at macro and micro level covering experimentation and modeling of biological haptic systems; Human themal/MMH response study/simulation, CAE for biomechanics simulation.

RA 03: Mobility, Robotics

This theme focuses on two, related, key areas: mobility, and robotics & autonomous systems. Mobility, and increasingly its variously autonomous versions, are a major enabler for design and manufacturing, as well as are required to be designed and manufactured. The traditional automotive, aerospace, and industrial robotics industry are all undergoing major transformation with the introduction of greater autonomy, change in types of fuels used as their driving force, and the degree of collaboration they can afford. At DM, work is distributed in a number of related areas, ranging from developing tools and physical experimentation to support design and manufacturing of lightweight structures for mobility, through design of manipulators and mechanisms for providing motion transformation, to the control of these motions in complex, ground, aerial, marine, industrial and social environments.

A major focus of DM has been supporting design of automotive systems at the systemic level, with a suite of the state-of-the-art AI tools for automotive subsystem design and advanced finite element modelling procedures for assessing performance enhancement under dynamic loads. The work led to many pioneering designs, including those for hybrid and electric two-, three- and four wheelers.

Typical topics in this theme are enlisted below:

Design of automotive systems, impact safety design, lightweight electric vehicles, CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering)-based procedure involving size and topology optimization, explicit nonlinear finite element analysis towards developing vehicle crash safety testing procedures; shape representation and motion realization; Eye-gaze controlled, safe, and affordable human robot interaction system for persons with severe speech and motor impairment; sanitization robot based on a tele-presence robot for navigation in medical facilities during the Covid-19 pandemic; Social robotics using natural language processing; collaborative motion planning of Autonomous Mobile Robots and Cobots in Industry 4.0, audio-aware navigation, multi-autonomous robots in warehouses, weed detection using deep learning on a collaborative robot, interactive control of mobile robots, multi-robot systems; Flexible continuum robots with potential for use in surgery.

RA 04: Smart, Sustainable Systems

This theme focuses on two key topics: smart and sustainable. With increased population and consumption and reduced availability of resources, both public opinion and regulations are ever stricter on compliance to sustainability in all its aspects – social, environmental and economic. For instance, a product typically produces over 20 times its mass as waste during its lifecycle. Design and manufacturing must take into account sustainability. Work in this area includes developing advanced models for assessing impacts, and inherent uncertainty in these assessments, for lifecycle processes for complex, global, spatio-temporally distributed products and manufacturing systems, and visualisations for these lifecycle processes; use of such tools developed at DM has shown to lead to over 25 times reduction in environmental impacts in products created using the tools. Biocomposites research involves using natural materials in developing composites with similar performance as that of artificial composites, but with reduced environmental impacts. Research into ‘smart systems’ includes exploring all elements of Industry 4.0 technologies for enhancement of design and manufacturing.

Typical topics in this theme are enlisted below.

Part tracking and automated inspection, sheet metal dimensionality inspection system; Digitalization and BIM Ecosystem for Collaboration and Coordination in Architecture Engineering and Construction, Digital twin in AEC; Sustainable processes and materials, biodegradable biocomposites; Eco-friendly cutting oil emulsions, open pore integrated heat exchangers; climate-responsive architecture, design for the Bottom of the Pyramid, Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV), framework for sustainability evaluation in design/technology and manufacturing, water and sanitation, framework for energy neutrality assessment; Smart/digital mfg/inspection, digital twin, sustainable products/materials/processes, Circular Economy, Sustainability Assessment.

RA 06: Materials, Manufacturing Processes

Design and manufacturing must go hand in hand. With a strong flavour of design and digitalization, this theme aims to develop materials, technologies and tools for advanced manufacturing, currently in the areas of sustainable materials (natural cutting oils, biocomposites, ceramics based composites to reduce NOx emissions), feedstocks for additive manufacturing, digital/smart manufacturing, additive manufacturing, sustainable manufacturing, and computational metrology. DM established the first ‘smart factory’ laboratory in India to integrate people, product, processes, tools and environment within a manufacturing system, to carry out acquisition and analytics of data on these for monitoring, prognostics/diagnostics and prevention/remediation of problems, thereby promising enhancement of productivity, reliability, safety and sustainability. Sustainable manufacturing aims to make manufacturing less intensive in resources, energy and environmental impacts. Computational metrology aims to automate inspection and testing, especially for parts with complex geometry.

Typical topics in this theme are enlisted below.

Low-cost, sustainable biocomposites, pure nanocellulose can be better replacement for single use plastics, static and dynamic behavior of lightweight composite structures, energy absorption capabilities of foam-filled composite tubes; Eco-friendly cutting oil emulsions, open pore integrated heat exchangers; Droplet-on-Demand Metal Additive Manufacturing; Hybrid Metal-Polymer 3D printing (MA); highly affordable feedstock production, Precision machining with Industry 4.0; precision manufacturing to evaluate product and production quality in micron scales; 3D printing for lightweighting; Severe Plastic Deformation processes; intuitive methods for assembly and kinematic models of mechanical assemblies; behaviors of adhesively-bonded joints; Smart/digital mfg, robotics/autonomous Systems in manufacturing, Industrial Engg; precision manufacturing.