I'm Senthur Raj, a Research Engineer at the University of Michigan: Robotics, Neurobionics Laboratory (https://neurobionics.robotics.umich.edu). I've been using Blender as a computational mechanical design tool for over a year to design robots and a few other mechanical systems.

One of the projects that I'd love to talk about is the Open-Source Leg (https://opensourceleg.com), which is an open-source lower-limb robotic prosthesis that aims to lower the barrier to entry for prosthetic control research. Being the lead design engineer, I used Blender to re-design the Knee and Ankle joints of the Open-Source Leg to make it more easier to manufacture, more affordable, and modular.

With Sverchok and a few custom python scripts, I was able to computationally solve all the design problems that we encountered--this accelerated our design process and gave us a real-time visualization of how a few decisions impacted our overall design.

I'm submitting this proposal for a general talk about how I used Blender for development of the Open-source Leg and an overview of using Blender as a computational mechanical design tool for robotics.