EAGER/Cybermanufacturing: WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Middleware for Additive Manufacturing

与大规模生产的同类产品相比，定制产品可以提供优势，包括更大的舒适性、独特的美学吸引力和/或更好的性能。加法制造保证了这种定制产品的成本效益，加法制造硬件、可用材料的范围和生产成本一直在稳步发展。然而，利用加法制造进行定制需要新型的数字模型和软件应用。当前对该问题的解决方案要么提供非常有限的定制，要么不保证定制的对象是有效的并且可以被制造成期望的规格。这一早期概念探索性研究补助金(EIGER)项目奖支持为加法制造建立软件框架的研究，该框架提供了一种更容易、更可扩展的方式来开发支持数字对象的交互式、高度预测性预览的特定领域软件应用程序。设计探索工具和精确的预览机构将使加法制造能够根据精确的尺寸规格进行。这意味着节省了大量的时间和材料成本，加速了添加剂制造的采用。这个软件框架将提供给大量的专家设计师、工程师、爱好者和学生，促进工业和消费产品的设计探索、制造和定制。软件框架将是一个中间件，允许为数字驱动的制造开发特定领域的应用程序，并将通过对可通过给定的附加工艺实现的设计空间的量化知识来了解。为了实现这一目标，将设计和构建以下组件：(1)封装在特定领域应用中的物理可实现的、终端用户可定制的数字对象族的通用表示；(2)用于精确和计算高效地表征附加制造过程的数据驱动方法，包括识别和缓解几何缺陷、特征尺寸界限和固有工艺缺陷；(3)用于交互式和高度预测性地探索给定对象家族和所需制造过程所跨越的设计空间的方法；以及(4)用于优化所需数字对象和特定附加制造材料-机械组合的过程参数的易于计算的方法。

Custom products can offer advantages over their mass-produced counterparts, including greater comfort, unique aesthetic appeal, and/or better performance. Additive manufacturing promises cost-effective fabrication of such custom products, and there has been steady progress in the additive manufacturing hardware, the range of available materials, and the production cost. However, taking advantage of additive manufacturing for customization requires new types of digital models and software applications. Current solutions to this problem either provide very restricted customization, or do not guarantee that the customized objects are valid and can be fabricated to the desired specifications. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project award supports research to establish a software framework for additive manufacturing that provides a substantially easier and a more scalable way of developing domain-specific software applications supporting an interactive, highly-predictive preview of digital objects. The design exploration tools and accurate preview mechanisms will enable additive manufacturing according to precise dimensional specifications. This translates to enormous time and material cost savings, accelerating the adoption of additive manufacturing. This software framework will be made available to a large population of expert designers, engineers, hobbyists, and students, facilitating design exploration, manufacturing, and customization of both industrial and consumer products. The software framework will be a middleware that allows development of domain-specific applications for digitally-driven manufacturing, and will be informed by quantitative knowledge of the design space that can be realized by a given additive process. To realize this goal, the following components are to be designed and built: (1) general representations for physically realizable, end-user customizable digital object families encapsulated within domain-specific applications; (2) data-driven methods for an accurate and computationally efficient characterization of additive manufacturing processes, including identification and mitigation of geometric imperfections, feature size bounds, and intrinsic process defects; (3) methods for an interactive and highly-predictive exploration of the design space spanned by a given object family and a desired manufacturing process; and (4) computationally tractable methods for optimizing process parameters for a desired digital object and a specific additive manufacturing material-machine combination.