!and yet it moves

AYIM was a project class at ETH Zurich in which students were responsible for the design and construction of a dynamic sculpture for public display. Projects were offered in the 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 academic years.

Students received a conceptual design at the beginning of the project and formed groups that concentrated on specific aspects of the system, such as mechanical, electrical, algorithm, and user interface design.

This was a two-part course.

Part One
The focus of the first semester was research, simulation and analysis, prototyping, and establishing the functional requirements for all the subsystems.

Students met regularly with the instructors for design reviews, during which each group presented the work on the subsystem they were responsible for. These meetings were a formal arena to iterate on the design, address integration issues, and were an opportunity for the students to maintain knowledge of the overall system.

Part Two
In the second semester students and instructors continued to meet regularly as designs were finalized, subsystems constructed, and the overall system assembled and tested.

Motivation

Pedagogical~
The course was a project-based introduction to systems engineering with an emphasis on system analysis, design, and integration. The topics covered included requirements driven design, manufacturability, maintainability, modelling and simulation of dynamical systems, and understanding the interplay between system design, control design, and simulation.

Research~
Model-based system and control design leverages knowledge accumulated over centuries, resulting in an extremely powerful paradigm. Our aim was to augment model-based control design with learning and adaptation to provide a flexible methodology for designing high-performance, robust systems.

Aesthetic~
Using fundamental principles from mathematics and physics, our mandate was to create four-dimensional objects with visceral aesthetic appeal. This appeal is closely tied to the efficiency of the engineering design and the relevance of the research objectives.