Sebastian Molano.

Autumn 2026 Germany

Sebastian
Molano

Robotics & Mechatronics EngineerRobot hands: mechanics, electronics, firmware

Everything we ever made,
we made with our hands.
I make hands.

Part.01

The hand

TAKTO ONE, an open-source hand exoskeleton. I designed and built it alone, end to end.

Twelve encoders read the finger joints where they bend. Eight motors in ten spool bays pull them back through elastic tendons. I designed its two circuit boards and wrote its firmware. The control loop runs on the device itself, not on a laptop.

takto.one

Part.02

The lab

OpenPhysicsAI, an open-source physics lab for people and AI agents. I created it and maintain it. Every film below is one of its solvers at work.

OpenPhysicsAI

Light near a black holea thin disk around a Schwarzschild black hole, seen at 85 degrees
A wing at 20 degreesNACA 0012 at Re 5300: past the stall, the smoke rolls up into vortices
A shock through a helium bubbleMach 1.22: the bubble rolls into a vortex pair
A radar dish, its beam and the echo3 GHz: a 1.6 m dish finds a metal cylinder 4.2 m away

Part.03

Printed with light

Aluminium, melted from powder by a laser, one thin layer at a time. At Hochschule Anhalt I worked as a research associate: I ran and maintained the metal printers and planned and ran the test builds.

The vase is imagined: a gyroid lattice that only a printer can build, drawn to show how a laser melts metal powder into a part, layer by layer.

A laser melts three tracks into steel200 W at 0.8 m/s, glowing with the solver's temperatures, simulated in my lab
The tracks of the laser in the metal, under the microscope in polarised light: rows of fish scales in blue, gold and violet
The tracks it leavesmelt pools under the microscope, polarised light · from my work at Hochschule Anhalt
The printed cylinder head close up: its ports and walls, and the thin supports the laser built under it
The parta cylinder head in AlSi10Mg, as printed · from my work at Hochschule Anhalt

Part.04

The road here

What I built on the way, from Medellín to Köthen, and what my part was in each. Where the originals were lost, they were rebuilt from the drawings.

04.1

Hyperspectral tissue

2025 · Hochschule Anhalt

My partThe classifiers, trained and tuned in Python.

Hyperspectral imaging is researched as a way to find cancer during surgery: a tumour can look like healthy tissue and still differ in its spectrum. A hyperspectral camera records each pixel as a spectrum of 92 narrow bands. I trained models to tell healthy tissue from cancer by that spectrum alone, from classical classifiers to neural networks. The best, a random forest, reached an F1 score of 0.934.

λ 400 nm

Drag along the spectrum to read one band. The tissue is drawn, not a patient's.

04.2

Myoelectric gripper

2025 · Hochschule Anhalt

My partTeam lead of three students, and first author of the manuscript.

An arm wired with surface electrodes, the cables running down to the hand The gripper as printed: grey fingers on their linkages, the servos in its base

A low-cost gripper for training with a prosthesis, driven by muscle signals (EMG). Each finger is a five-bar linkage held by a spring, so one servo closes it and it wraps around whatever it meets. A burst of muscle activity past a threshold closes the hand, the next one opens it.

Read the manuscript (PDF)

04.3

Ball and beam

2020 · Universidad EAFIT

My partAll of it, alone. The design, the printed parts, the wiring, the PID code and the phone app.

rebuilt from my printed parts and balanced by a simulation of my own PID code

set 92 mmball 20 mmservo 92.0°beam 0.0°

or drag the gold mark under the beam, as with my potentiometer

more Kp pulls harder, and it overshoots

more Ki closes the last gap, slowly

more Kd damps the swing

Tap the beam to push the ball. A reading out of range turns red and is thrown away, as in my code.

The ball and beam in 2020, with an orange ping-pong ball on its two rods beside the right-hand sensor. The servo and its arm are on the left, the box with the Arduino stands behind the rods and the pivot's stand is on the right.
the real one, 2020

A servo tilts a beam, and the ball rolls. Two ultrasonic sensors find it, one at each end, and a PID loop I wrote by hand for an Arduino brings it back to where you set it. I built it alone during the 2020 quarantine to teach PID, with a phone app of my own for the set point and the gains.

The parts are drawn from my CAD files, and the beam is a simulation that starts from my gains.

04.4

Cycloidal drive

2022 · Universidad EAFIT · reconstructed from the FEM images

My partWith one classmate: the design, the finite-element analysis and the build.

the drive, reconstructed, 11:1
von Mises stress in the disc, recomputed for every frame

An eleven-lobed disc rolls inside a ring of twelve pins, so the output turns eleven times slower and far stronger. We modelled it, checked it with finite elements, and built it.

04.5

Remote-control drywall cart

2021 · Palm Beach Marble Imports, Florida · remade from the paper's CAD figures

My partThe whole design, written up as my paper during my internship there.

A dark shop floor with yellow lines: an orange drywall cart carries a slab of white marble past racks of stone, and in the foreground, out of focus, a hand holds the radio transmitter that drives it

The marble shop's drywall carts, converted to drive by radio. My design lets one person steer 500 lb of slabs with one hand from up to 500 m away. I checked the frame with finite elements, chose the motors and the chain drive, laid out the controls as a state machine, and kept every part buildable with the shop's own tools, for about 640 USD.

Read the paper (PDF)

The cart taken apart in the air: the orange frame above, then the mounting plate, the sealed electronics box with the Arduino and the radio receiver, and below them the battery, a motor with its chain drive, the drive wheels and two swivel casters
Under the deck: two DC motors, 1600 W together · a chain drive, 1:5 · a 48 V battery · an Arduino Mega · a radio receiver (FS-i6X) · the wheels · a steel frame checked with finite elements.

04.6

Oscar's House

2021 · Autodesk Revit · remade in Blender from the Revit renders

My partThe architecture, designed and modelled in Revit.

The house from above in the last light: the whole roof is a meadow with skylights and a small wooden terrace, the lattice climbs its side, and long paths and pools run beside it among trees

A house with a garden on its roof. The wooden lattice along one side is also the way up. In the low evening sun it lays a grid of shadows across the white wall, and the water beside the long wooden walkways mirrors it.

The same house after dark: warm rooms lit behind the glass, mirrored in the pool
and after dark

Everything, by place

  1. KöthenTAKTO ONEopen-source hand exoskeleton · master's thesis
  2. KöthenOpenPhysicsAIan open physics lab for people and AI agents
  3. KöthenMetal printed by laserAlSi10Mg · residual stress, heat treatment, microscopy
  4. KöthenHyperspectral tissuemachine learning that tells cancer from healthy tissue in 92-band images
  5. KöthenMyoelectric gripperEMG control, underactuated · team lead, first author
  6. KöthenAgents that keep secretsconsent-scoped negotiation between AI agents
  7. Köthenbno085-multi · dynamixel-on-deviceopen-source drivers for small chips
  8. KöthenPenumbra and other macOS toolssmall programs I wanted and nobody made
  9. MedellínCargobotdesign engineer · parts for autonomous logistics systems
  10. MedellínBaubotiksa robotics channel on YouTube · ten videos, about 60,000 views
  11. MedellínCycloidal drivean 11:1 reducer, built with a classmate · Universidad EAFIT
  12. MedellínSix-axis arm, simulatedkinematics from scratch in MATLAB · Universidad EAFIT
  13. MedellínBall and beama PID loop written by hand for an Arduino, with its own phone app · Universidad EAFIT
  14. MedellínCamera gimbala stepper-driven yoke for a professional camera, on 3D-printed bearings · Universidad EAFIT
  15. MedellínMy first robotdesigned to draw: a five-bar arm on two steppers, over a bed that rises and lowers · Universidad EAFIT
  16. Palm BeachRemote-control drywall cartfor marble slabs · Palm Beach Marble Imports
  17. Palm BeachOscar's Housemodelled in Autodesk Revit

Part.05

The universe is almost entirely empty.
We are the corner of it that woke up.

It took nearly fourteen billion years.
I try to make things worth the wait.

Building something like this?
Write me. I answer.

[email protected]

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