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Mechanical
engineering professor Art Erdman calls himself a Cupid, but his
matches have nothing to do with romance. Rather, he's a catalyst
for fruitful liaisons between pure research and entrepreneurial
know-how.
Holder of more than 30 patents, Erdman has applied his expertise
to areas as disparate as the mechanics of high-performance sports,
the design of dental crowns, and the development of remedies for
macular degeneration, a leading cause of age-related blindness.
“I've worked on all the ‘ologies,'” said Erdman. “There's a great
benefit in being at a world-class university with a medical school
and a dental school. You have access to many experts, laboratories,
equipment, and top-notch students.”
Over the years he's pursued collaborations that have the potential
to enhance both the University and made-in-Minnesota manufacturing.
“It's a service to the state,” he said of his efforts to create
new products that generate start-up companies and strengthen Minnesota
's economy.
He's also motivated by a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and
the challenge of solving complex mechanical engineering problems.
A runner who completes four or five marathons a year, Erdman has
long been interested in applying standard engineering techniques
to the analysis of athletic performance in winter sports. In 2001,
he and a student were working on a way to optimize the biomechanics
of the start used in the luge. News of that research prompted the
U.S. women's Olympic bobsled team to ask Erdman if he could develop
an off-track start system.
“The bobsled practice track was very crowded, so they needed another
way to practice,” he explained.
It was just the kind of challenge Erdman relishes—solving a recurrent
problem that requires the combined efforts of multifaceted specialists.
“It was one of those Cupid things,” is the way he describes his
ability to assemble “Team Minnesota,” a group of his former students,
and to attract corporate support from Aspen Research, a subsidiary
of Andersen Corporation; EnduraTEC Systems Corporation (now a part
of Bose Corporation); and Acceleration Minnesota, a manufacturer
of high-end treadmills for the professional athlete.
The group devised a treadmill-based simulated start system, and
the athlete who completed its first test run was amazed to discover
that “she improved her performance by 20 percent on her first try,”
Erdman said.
With the new training system in place, the U.S. women's bobsled
team went on to win a gold medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Throughout his career, Erdman has applied his ingenuity to many
vexing mechanical engineering problems. His team developed the Linkage
Interactive Computer Analysis and Graphically Enhanced Synthesis
(LINCAGES) software package for mechanical design and analysis.
LINCAGES has been licensed to more than 80 universities and companies
and has produced more than a half million dollars in revenue for
the University.
A few years ago, he worked on a system to digitize the standard
technique for fitting a dental crown. As anyone with a bad tooth
knows, fitting a crown can be a time-consuming ordeal involving
several unpleasant appointments. Erdman and his colleagues worked
out a way to truncate the whole process.
“We used a laser to digitize the 3-D coordinate system of the tooth
[needing repair], and then the idea was to mill out the restoration,”
he said.
More recently, Erdman and retinal surgeon Timothy W. Olsen have
been working to improve retinal surgery procedures. Together with
Ph.D. student Paul Loftness, they developed a scleral depressor,
an automated device that will allow surgeons to see more of the
retina during operations. The instrument will replace a century-old
procedure in which a surgical assistant presses a crude, pen-like
tool against the sclera (the outer membrane of the eye) to move
the peripheral retina into the surgeon's view.
The team's work on macular degeneration is in an earlier stage
and is still awaiting a patent, but a new start-up company named
Macular Regeneration Inc. is set to market the researchers' invention.
Although the potential for royalties always exists when an invention
is brought to market, Erdman says that isn't the driving force behind
his creativity. “It would be nice [to make money from inventions],
but that's not the goal,” he said. “The idea of helping in a situation
where somebody is losing their vision—well, you'd feel proud of
your career.”
By Judy Woodward
Republished with permission from the summer 2006 edition of Inventing
Tomorrow, a publication of the Institute of Technology.
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