Machina Labs
Machina Labs is a ~70 person robotic sheet metal forming startup located in Chatsworth, CA. The company focuses on using robotic arms to form sheet metal with dual-sided-incremental forming practices, a novel practice. Machina Labs' primary customers are within the Aerospace and Automotive industry, with many parts falling under ITAR compliance. In the summer of 2025, I was a Manufacturing Engineering Intern for the company.
Automated Scanner Cover
During my internship, I shadowed multiple highly qualified engineers on their day-to-day to find a problem that was plaguing the production workflow. Ultimately, I settled on creating an automated scanner cover, which increased production efficiency. At Machina Labs, the robots not only form the metal, but also perform inspection in the form of scanning each part. This is accomplished by attaching a 3D scanner to the end effector once forming has been completed. This must be done after forming by a human because the forming process requires certain materials to be applied to the sheet metal that can ruin the lens of the scanner. To prevent this, I created a scanner housing that contained a moving door that could communicate with the robot when scanning begins. It also contained a hall-effect end stop to ensure that the stepper motor didn't cause the door to crash.
Rhino3D/Grasshopper Computational Geometry
During my time at Machina Labs, I found myself highly interested in the software that was used for pathplanning, part designing, and geometry visualization. I took it upon myself to learn the visual programming language they were using, Grasshopper, with the help of my coworkers. I ultimately worked on some projects in Grasshopper, such as a part tolerance visualizer script. This script, written entirely by me, would take a mesh as input and be able to guide technicians through the thickness measuring process. Once these measurements were taken, they could be uploaded to the script and the associated error when compared to the mesh would be shown. This was used for presentations with aerospace customers.
