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Generative Design of Sheet Metal Structures

Published: 26 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Sheet Metal (SM) fabrication is perhaps one of the most common metalworking technique.
Despite its prevalence, SM design is manual and costly, with rigorous practices that restrict the search space, yielding suboptimal results.
In contrast, we present a framework for the first automatic design of SM parts. Focusing on load bearing applications, our novel system generates a high-performing manufacturable SM that adheres to the numerous constraints that SM design entails:
The resulting part minimizes manufacturing costs while adhering to structural, spatial, and manufacturing constraints. In other words, the part should be strong enough, not disturb the environment, and adhere to the manufacturing process. These desiderata sum up to an elaborate, sparse, and expensive search space.
Our generative approach is a carefully designed exploration process, comprising two steps. In Segment Discovery connections from the input load to attachable regions are accumulated, and during Segment Composition the most performing valid combination is searched for.
For Discovery, we define a slim grammar, and sample it for parts using a Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, ran in intercommunicating instances (i.e, chains) for diversity. This, followed by a short continuous optimization, enables building a diverse and high-quality library of substructures. During Composition, a valid and minimal cost combination of the curated substructures is selected. To improve compliance significantly without additional manufacturing costs, we reinforce candidate parts onto themselves --- a unique SM capability called self-riveting. we provide our code and data in https://github.com/amir90/AutoSheetMetal.
We show our generative approach produces viable parts for numerous scenarios. We compare our system against a human expert and observe improvements in both part quality and design time. We further analyze our pipeline's steps with respect to resulting quality, and have fabricated some results for validation.
We hope our system will stretch the field of SM design, replacing costly expert hours with minutes of standard CPU, making this cheap and reliable manufacturing method accessible to anyone.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 42, Issue 4
August 2023
1912 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/3609020
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 26 July 2023
Published in TOG Volume 42, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. computational fabrication
  2. generative design
  3. sheet metal

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