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

定制产品可以提供优于大规模生产的产品的优势，包括更大的舒适度，独特的美学吸引力和/或更好的性能。增材制造承诺以具有成本效益的方式制造此类定制产品，并且增材制造硬件、可用材料的范围和生产成本都取得了稳步进展。然而，利用增材制造进行定制需要新型的数字模型和软件应用程序。目前对这个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，并且可以按照期望的规格制造。EARLY概念探索性研究（EAGER）项目奖支持研究建立增材制造的软件框架，提供更容易和更可扩展的方式来开发特定领域的软件应用程序，支持数字对象的交互式，高度预测性预览。设计探索工具和精确的预览机制将使增材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，加速了增材制造的采用。这个软件框架将提供给大量的专家设计师，工程师，业余爱好者和学生，促进工业和消费产品的设计探索，制造和定制。该软件框架将是一个中间件，允许为数字化驱动的制造开发特定领域的应用程序，并将通过给定的增材工艺实现的设计空间的定量知识来提供信息。为了实现这一目标，需要设计和构建以下组件：（1）封装在特定领域应用中的物理上可实现的、最终用户可定制的数字对象族的通用表示;（2）用于增材制造过程的准确和计算高效表征的数据驱动方法，包括几何缺陷、特征尺寸界限、和固有的工艺缺陷;（3）用于对给定对象族和期望的制造工艺所跨越的设计空间进行交互式和高度预测性探索的方法;以及（4）用于优化期望的数字对象和特定的增材制造材料-机器组合的工艺参数的计算上易处理的方法。

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.