September 18, 2023

By Louis DiPietro

To Ilan Mandel, a Cornell robotics researcher and builder, the math didn’t add up. How could a new, off-the-shelf hoverboard cost less than the parts that compose it?

“This becomes an ambient frustration as a designer – the incredible cheapness of products that exist in the world, and the incredible expenses for prototyping or building anything from scratch,” said Mandel, a doctoral student in the field of information science, based at Cornell Tech.