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SPIROU: Constrained exploration for mechanical motion design

Roussel, R; Cani, MP; Léon, JC; Mitra, NJ; (2017) SPIROU: Constrained exploration for mechanical motion design. In: Mueller, S and Coros, S and Fang, N, (eds.) SCF '17: Proceedings of the 1st Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): New York, NY, USA. Green open access

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Abstract

Mechanisms are ubiquitous in our daily lives, and the motion they are able to transmit is often a critical part of their function. While fabrication from a virtual model can be done relatively easily in a fab lab, creating or customizing a model according to functional specifications remains a challenging task. We focus on a fascinating application: drawing machines. Devices such as the popular Spirograph can easily generate intricate patterns from an assembly of simple mechanical elements. Designing such machines, however, is made particularly tedious by the complex influence each configuration parameter has on the final drawing. We propose a novel constrained exploration method that enables a user to easily explore feasible drawings by directly indicating pattern preferences at different levels of control. The user starts by selecting a target pattern with the help of construction lines and rough sketching, and then fine-tunes it by prescribing geometric features of interest directly on the drawing. The designed pattern can then be directly realized with an easy-to-fabricate drawing machine. The key technical challenge is to allow the user to effectively explore the high dimensional configuration space of such fabricable machines. To this end, we propose a novel method that dynamically reparam-eterizes the local configuration space in order to allow the user to explore drawing variations while preserving user-specified feature constraints. We tested our framework on several examples, conducted a user study, and fabricated a sample of the designed examples.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: SPIROU: Constrained exploration for mechanical motion design
Event: 1st Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF '17)
ISBN-13: 9781450349994
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/3083157.3083158
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3083157.3083158
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: design space, exploration, constraints, drawing machines, mechanical motion, fabrication
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1559257
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