Laser cutting is an integral part of many industries, from automobile manufacturing to construction. However, this process is not always simple and efficient: cutting huge sheets of metal takes time and experience, and even the most careful users can still produce huge amounts of leftover material that goes to waste. The core technologies that lasers use to cut edges aren't really that advanced: their users are often in the dark about how much of each material they've used, or if the design they have in mind can even be manufactured.
With that in mind, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have created a new tool called Fabricaide that provides live feedback on how different parts of a design should be placed on their sheets, and can even analyze exactly how much material is being used.
"By giving feedback on the feasibility of creating a project as it is created, Fabricaide allows users to better plan their projects in the context of the materials available," says Ticha Setapakdi, a graduate student who led the development of the system with MIT Professor Stephanie Mueller, student Adrian Reginald Chua Si, and Carnegie Mellon University graduate student Daniel Anderson.
Fabricaide has a workflow that the team says significantly reduces the feedback loop between design and manufacturing. The tool keeps an archive of what the user has done, keeping track of how much of each material they have left behind. It also allows the user to assign multiple materials to different parts of the structure that need to be cut, which simplifies the process so that it's less of a headache for multi-material structures.
Another important element of Fabricaide is a custom 2-D packaging algorithm that can optimally efficiently distribute parts across sheets in real time. The team has shown that their algorithm is faster than existing open source tools, while still providing comparable quality. (The algorithm can also be disabled if the user already knows how they want to arrange the materials.)
"Many of these materials are very scarce resources, and so there is often a problem when the designer doesn't realize that he has run out of material until he has already cut out the design," says Setapakdi. "With Fabrikaid, they'll be able to find out about it earlier, so they can figure out how best to distribute the materials in advance."
As the user creates their design, the tool optimizes the placement of parts on existing sheets and issues warnings if there is not enough material, with suggestions for replacing the material (for example, using 1 mm thick yellow acrylic instead of 1 mm thick red acrylic). Fabricaide acts as an interface that integrates with existing design tools and is compatible with both 2-D and 3-D CAD programs such as AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and even Adobe Illustrator.
In the future, the team hopes to incorporate more complex properties of materials, such as how strong or flexible they should be. The team says they could imagine Fabricaide being used in shared makerspaces as a way to reduce waste. The user can see that, say, 10 people are trying to use a certain material, and then can switch to another material for their design to save resources.