FURI | Spring 2019

Automated Process Planning for Multi-material Manufacturing

This project is studying methods of automating the planning of multi-material manufacturing processes through the development of a new framework for representing and computing functionally-graded materials for use in rapid prototyping applications.  This framework includes low-level operations for combining geometries together and algorithms which assist the designer in computing manufacturing-compatible sequences. These algorithms can then be applied to generate manufacturing steps for multi-material models.  This research is informing the development of a software planning tool which will simplify a process through which robust and low-cost robots can be created for education or research.