Building Block Design for Layered Shape Manufacturing

Abstract

Abstract We are interested in designing complex mechatronic systems which closely integrate electronics, actuators, and sensors with mechanical structures. Rapid prototyping techniques open new design possibilities for these systems, such as the ability to fabricate pre-assembled mechanisms. This paper presents a design approach that should encourage exploration of these new possibilities and thereby facilitate robot design. In the described approach, engineers build designs using a library of three dimensional primitives and aggregations of primitives. Associated with each primitive is enough manufacturing process information to enable immediate manufacturability analysis. An algorithm is presented which automatically combines the process information from multiple primitives. A prototype system using this algorithm has been implemented with AutoCAD and the ObjectARX programming interface.