Facilities

The Design group offers a rich and diverse set of facilities in support of its academic and research efforts. Among them:

The Assistive Technology Laboratory at Stanford (ATLAS) (Prof. Drew Nelson, Director; David L. Jaffe, MS, Associate Director) provides space and prototyping resources for ENGR110/210 student teams engaged in designing and fabricating devices to help individuals with disabilities. It is located in the Peterson Building, Room 134.

The Biorobotics and Dextrous Manipulation Laboratory (Prof. Mark Cutkosky, PI) is affiliated with the Center for Design Research. BDML research activities include: modeling and control of dextrous manipulation with robotic and teleoperated hands; force and tactile feedback in telemanipulation and virtual environments; design and control of compliant "biomimetic" robots with embedded sensors and actuators.

Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) (Prof. Chris Gerdes, Director; Sven Beiker, PhD, Executive Director) is an interdisciplinary research lab. By creating a community of faculty and students from a range of disciplines at Stanford with leading industry researchers, CARS hopes to radically re-envision the automobile for unprecedented levels of safety, performance, and enjoyment.  CARS' mission is to discover, build, and deploy the critical ideas and innovations for the next generation of cars and drivers. 

The Center for Design Research (Prof. Larry Leifer, Director) is a community of scholars focused on understanding and augmenting engineering design innovation and design education. We are dedicated to facilitating individual creativity, understanding the team design process, and developing advanced tools and methods that promote superior design and manufacturing of products. We develop concepts and technical solutions for design thinking, concurrent engineering, distributed collaborative design, and design knowledge capture, indexing and re-use. We focus on methods and tools for improving the design of specific engineering systems, with research in structural integrity evaluation and system modeling, virtual design environments, biomimetic robots, haptic controls and telemanipulation, vehicle dynamics, and driver assistance systems.  CDR is located in Bldg 560.

The Design Observatory (DO) (Prof. Larry Leifer, PI) is a research environment for studying engineering design activity by observing it, analyzing it and intervening into it. Engineering designers either individually or in teams can perform a variety of design activities like idea generation, prototyping, and design meetings in the DO. Through observation, videotape and analysis, the researchers discover patterns of behavior that are correlated to effective design performance. The DO environment is flexible enough to allow researchers to set up different design experiments quickly and easily. It also allows researchers to investigate various aspects of design behavior in a detailed manner. The end results of the research carried out in the DO are new metrics of effective design behaviors, new research methods, and new design behaviors or practices. The DO is located in the Center for Design Research.

The ME310 Loft (Prof. Larry Leifer, PI) provides space and technical support for globally distributed product development teams working on corporate partner projects. Teams are assigned a desktop design station with internet video studio support. The ME310 Loft is located in the Terman Engineering Center on the fifth floor.

The Dynamic Design Lab (DDL) (Prof. Chris Gerdes, PI) focuses on the use of dynamic modeling as a means of integrating mechanical design with automatic control and diagnostics. Many of the sponsored projects have an automotive application and the lab has a small fleet of full-scale and 1:4 scale vehicles for experimentation. Check out this video of Shelley, an automous rally car developed by students at DDL and researchers at Volkswagen's Electrnoics Research Lab. The DDL is located in the Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory (MERL) on Panama Mall, Room 130.

The Loft is a unique facility that represents the culture of innovation at Stanford.  It is a space in which students of the Stanford Design Program (Prof. Banny Banerjee, Program Director) carry out graduate level design work. It is located in Building 610 at the corner of Santa Teresa and Duena Streets.

The Manufacturing Modeling Laboratory (Kurt Beiter, PhD., Acting Director) conducts research on system design and management with emphasis on robust concept development and life-cycle engineering. It is also the home of the course sequence ME317 Design for Manufacturability, a project-based curriculum that serves both on-campus and distance learning students.  MML is located in the Thornton Center for Engineering Management.

The Microscale Engineering Laboratory is located in the Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory (MERL), and is shared by Professors Goodson, Kenny and Santiago affiliated with the Thermosciences and Design Groups.  This lab features facilities for thermal, mechanical, and fluid measurements with a unifying emphasis on microscale aspects.  In addition to the individual research activities of these faculty members, there are also several shared PhD projects, involving a mixture of thermal, mechanical and fluids issues in single projects.

The Product Realization Laboratory (PRL) (Prof. David Beach & Craig Milroy, Co-Directors) offers design-oriented prototype creation facilities to students engaged in course work or research.  Design reaches fruition in the testing of hardware.  The creation of physical artifacts often leads to design solutions that would otherwise not occur. Hands-on experience engenders tacit knowledge regarding devices, materials and processes. Relationships between design and manufacturing are clarified through prototype creation.  The PRL is located in Building 610 at the corner of Santa Teresa and Duena Streets and is open during the academic year. 

The focus of the Rapid Prototyping Laboratory for Energy and Biology (Prof. Fritz Prinz, PI) is on the design and fabrication of micro and nanoscale devices for energy and biology. Examples include fuel cells and bioreactors. Interest is in mass transport phenomena across thin membranes such as oxide films and lipid bi-layers. This research group studies electro-chemical phenomena with the help of Atomic Force Microscopy, Impedance Spectroscopy, and Quantum Modeling. The RPL is located in Bldg 530.

The Robotic Locomotion Lab (Prof. Ken Waldron, PI) focuses on the design of robotic systems, robotic vehicles, legged locomotion systems, haptic simulation, design of medical devices and design for manufacturability. The lab is located in Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory (MERL), Room 128, on Panama Mall.

The Smart Product Design Laboratory (Prof. Ed Carryer, Director) supports microprocessor application projects related to ME218abcd and is located in the Thornton Center for Engineering Managmenet.

The Stanford Micro-Structures and Sensors Laboratory (Prof. Tom Kenny, PI) is the setting for efforts to develop and fabricate novel mechanical structures. Basic research on the non-classical phenomena exhibited by micro structures is emphasized as well.

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