About Me

Daniel M. Aukes, PhD

I am an engineer and educator, having spent ten years as a professor in the field of robotics. My goal is to help you build your knowledge of design and technology, get your hardware working, and propel your next idea to a working prototype and solid product concept.

Key Skills & Focus Areas

I offer product and system design assistance, with a focus on developing novel robotic platforms focusing on the following activities:

• Embedded System Design: Hardware, Software, and Integration
• Mechanism Design: Analysis, Optimization, Prototyping, and Fabrication
• Physics Modeling, Experimentation, Data Collection, and Validation: Build a digital twin of your system.
• System Automation: From autonomous robots to assembly lines, I have extensive experience automating small and large systems.
• Software Development: From embedded programming to database and web interactivity.
• Training, Documentation, & Course Development: Over a decade of experience mentoring young engineers through traditional course formats as well as informal advising and mentorship. Extensive experience producing accompanying course materials.

Biosketch

Daniel M. Aukes was a tenured professor in engineering and robotics at Arizona State University before leaving academia. As the director of the IDEAlab, he investigated the nexus of design, manufacturing, and data-driven decision-making towards the development of robots that can operate in niche environments, with a focus on affordability and accessibility. He is a former Technology Development Fellow at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and completed post-doctoral research in the Harvard MicroRobotics Lab, developing manufacturing planning software for origami-inspired robots. Dr. Aukes received his PhD and Masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, studying the design of underactuated robotics hands. He received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University.

Dr. Aukes’s industry experiences have focused on manufacturing automation across a wide range of industries including automotive, pharmaceutical, and food-processing.

Education

• PhD, Stanford University, Mechanical Engineering
• MS, Stanford University, Mechanical Engineering
• BS, Northwestern University, Mechanical Engineering

Teaching

• Foldable Robotics: A graduate-level course that teaches the design and analysis of foldable mechanisms, digital manufacturing, physical modeling and design optimization from the perspective of project-based applications where students design, build, validate, and improve their own robots.
• Experimentation and Deployment of Robotic Systems: This course teaches robot communication, sensing, data visualization, experiment design, computer vision, neural networks, and more. The course is centered around developing data-driven decision making pipelines on real robotic systems using ROS2.
• Embedded Systems Design Project I & II: This is a 3rd year course sequence that takes students through the design, build, test process for embedded systems. Students work in project teams to create user-centered designs that address a given need, with a focus on circuit design and debugging, PCB fabrication, microcontroller-level programming, analog and serial sensing, serial communication, and more.
• Flexible Robotics: An undergraduate version of Foldable Robotics, with an emphasis on compliant systems, manual fabrication, and accessible modeling approaches via off-the-shelf physics engines.
• Informal Robotics: a course originally developed by Chuck Hoberman, Dan Aukes, and Jonathan Grinham at the Harvard University graduate school of design. Focused on the iterative process of designing robotic systems made possible by "informal" materials. This course was the progenitor of the engineering-focused "Foldable Robotics".