De Vinci Innovation Center: Five Different Universes To Test Innovation Tools like MIT Media Lab does

Just a year after its opening, the De Vinci Innovation Center has become a fully functional laboratory of the future. The trans-disciplinary research lab of the Pole Leonard de Vinci equipped itself with some twenty new series of cutting-edge equipment and innovative technology tools. The Center supports the development of eHealth research, Industry 4.0, mixed reality and 3D-printing.

The De Vinci Innovation Center is on a mission, inspired by the MIT Media Lab’s motto, “Demo or die”.

The Pole Leonard de Vinci’s interdisciplinary Center commits every day to transform traditional project development and maker movement methods to offer students new experiences based on radical learning, anti-disciplinarity, and collective intelligence.

The Center has welcomed over 400 students since its opening in January 2019. Several mixed teams used its facilities and infrastructures to work on various projects as part of annual events organised by the three schools of the Pole Leonard de Vinci: “BAP” (sort of stock exchange of projects, categorised by IIM), “PING” (projects of general engineers in the digital market), “PIX” (Innovation and Exploration Project) and “PCJ” (Junior Consultant projects, designed by EMLV students).

DVIC Lab supports more than fifteen projects led by students, researchers and technical student associations, as part of their master studies, research career or creation of a start-up business. The Center consists of five infrastructures, a FabLab and a workshop space.

Electronic lab

The electronic lab is equipped with several state-of-the-art facilities to design the next generation of printed circuits.

• CNC/Milling Machines to make PCBs
• Oscilloscopes and DMM (digital multimeter)
• High-resolution and plentiful precision power supply
• Robotic Arm

Thanks to this infrastructure, the student association Vinci Eco-Drive developed its latest prototype of energy-efficient vehicle E.Pulv 2.2.

The project team is composed by: Brunelle MARTIN, David AZOULAY, Elodie TOROSSIAN, Florent MARTIMORT, François MOULIN, Guillaume ZANCHI, Julie PICOT, Mathieu MILLET, Matthieu LANCA, Victor WEILL

“To improve its performance in the Shell Eco Marathonand to prepare for the future, Vinci Eco Drive is developing its new electric prototype. The latter will make it possible to take advantage of the association’s expertise over the past five years. This new prototype is also necessary because the current one is nearing the end of its optimisation cycle.” (Vinci Eco Drive )

Soft & Active Matters Lab

These infrastructures allow for creating prosthetic prototypes that integrate synthetic skin capable of returning a sense of touch to patients.

Several types of equipment that are used in the fields of biomechanics (medical prostheses), intelligent textiles and clothing, industry 4.0 are made available to students:

• CNC Sewing/Embroidery Machine
• CNC Saddle Machine
• Vinyl cutter
• Heat press machine
• Laboratory centrifuge
• Laboratory vacuum pump

Artificial intelligence

The DVIC students are training artificial intelligence algorithms using a powerful expert workstation built for High-Performance Computing and a DGX station.

• • 4 HPC servers
  • Nvidia DGX Station
  • Jetson AGX Xavier/li>

The Audio Driven Mouth Animation project provides a 3D techniques-based artificial intelligence framework. The project was led by Yliess Hati, PhD student at ESILV School of Engineering.

The PaintsTorch project is another milestone in the development of deep learning. This project proposes a user-guided anime line art colourisation tool with double generator conditional adversarial network. The tool conceived by  Clément Duhart, Yliess Hati, Francis Rousseaux et Grégor Jouet was presentedat the 16th CM SIGGRAPGH European Conference on Visual Media Production.

3D Printing Workspace

These pieces of equipment allow students and technical associations to design the majority of their projects, be they applicable in additive manufacturing, mould construction or flexible robotics

• Prusa 3D printing PL and ABS
• Lynxter 3D print

4D Space

A learning environment for students to explore virtual reality, the 4D Space is dedicated to research, experimentation and creation around mixed dimensions.

• Occulus Quest virtual reality headset
• Microsoft’s Hololens technology
• Nvidia VR GPus
• HTC Vive Pro virtual reality headset
• Kat Walk mini
• Optitrack motion capture systems

In a world where technology is more critical than ever, it is essential to develop a mindset towards innovation, challenge one’s ideas and confront them with the market reality. At the De Vinci Innovation Center, the Innovation programme promotes the emergence of innovative projects and explores the limits and possibilities offered by different technologies.