Computational Aspects of Fabrication

Summary

As manufacturing goes digital, we are facing a fundamental change in the workflow of fabrication. While access to advanced digital fabrication and 3D-printing technology becomes ubiquitous and provides new possibilities for fabricating complex, functional, multi-material objects with unconventional properties, its potential impact is currently limited by the lack of efficient and intuitive methods for content creation. Existing tools are usually restricted to expert users, have been developed based on the capabilities of traditional manufacturing processes, and do not sufficiently take fabrication constraints into account. Scientifically, we are facing the fundamental challenge that existing simulation techniques and design approaches for predicting the physical properties of materials and objects at the resolution of modern 3D printers fail to scale well with possible object complexity.

To achieve significant progress, we need a deep understanding of interdisciplinary fundamentals: Shape, Appearance of Shape and Materials, Validated Simulation, and Engineering Design. The purpose of this Dagstuhl Seminar is to bring together leading experts from academia and industry in the area of computer graphics, geometry processing, mechanical engineering, human-computer interaction, material science, and robotics. The goal is to address fundamental questions and issues related to computational aspects of fabrication, build bridges between related fields, and further pioneer this area.

There has been a considerable growth in the number of articles treating aspects of computational fabrication, scattered across multiple disciplines and journals. In this seminar we gathered together these various threads and described the computational accomplishments and outstanding challenges. Researchers from different communities analyzed which existing fabrication workflows could benefit most from computation and identify novel application domains, with the aim of cross-fertilizing ideas between disciplines. The main goal of this seminar was identifying and reporting common grand challenges and developing a roadmap for addressing them. Additionally, the seminar seeked to discuss and establish standards and best practices for sharing research results, code, and hardware prototypes, facilitating reproducibility and reusability of results among disciplines. An important aspect of this was to analyze teaching and learning needs for new students in the field, and coordinating the development of teaching material.