In an effort to reduce the large amounts of leftover materials (which usually end up as waste) produced by the laser-cutting process in the industry, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a new tool called Fabricaide. The tool could help designers save time and resources on their projects.
"By giving feedback on the feasibility of a design as it's being created, Fabricaide allows users to better plan their designs in the context of available materials," says Ph.D. student Ticha Sethapakdi, who led the development of the system alongside MIT Professor Stefanie Mueller, undergraduate Adrian Reginald Chua Sy, and Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. student Daniel Anderson.
Fabricaide has a workflow that the team says significantly shortens the feedback loop between design and fabrication. The tool keeps an archive of what the user has done, tracking how much of each material they have left. It also allows the user to assign multiple materials to different parts of the design to be cut, which simplifies the process so that it's less of a headache for multi-material designs.
Learn more about this tool over at TechXplore.
Cool!
(Image Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology/ TechXplore)
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This is a great idea. I threw away a lot of parts and pieces of material because I couldn't figure out how to fit everything together tightly on the laser cutting platform.
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