Research Summaries

Back Maker Space Collaboration: Sharing Best Practices and Lessons Learned for Facilities, Equipment and Personnel

Fiscal Year 2020
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department NPS Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Sadagic, Amela
Gunduz, Ibrahim E.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary Additive Manufacturing (AM) will have a major impact on future Navy and Marine operations. Fabrication labs and Maker labs are important catalysts for learning, collaborating, and experimenting with rapid prototyping and AM, and they can also accelerate the adoption of AM within the Navy. For example, RoboDojo at NPS is designed to promote informal hands-on learning with open hours and volunteer mentors to help the NPS community learn about rapid prototyping (e.g, with 3D printers and laser cutters) along with numerous other design capabilities for hardware/software integration. Nevertheless, setting up such facilities that require diverse equipment and talents can be challenging. Repeated site visits and surveys by NPS faculty have shown that this kind of capability is widely encouraged, sometimes supported but rarely achieved long term. A shared forum and documentation regarding lab best practices can speed necessary progress for Navy/USMC commands. As part of this project, investigators and participants in the RoboDojo and the NPS Center for Additive Manufacturing will create and produce a multitude of models, facility guidelines, manuals, teaching/learning materials, and training videos to help share NPS capabilities for the benefit of Makers across the Naval service. These will include NPS X3D Model Exchange that shares models in formats compatible with 3D printers that offers unique capabilities for Navy and Marine Makers to share, view and print 3D models. Likewise, NPS Makers will also benefit from their interactions with other Makers in the Navy.
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Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal