Figure 11 - uploaded by Maria Larsson
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For a two-timber joint in 3 × 3 × 3 resolution, the number of possibilities for a voxelized cube (left) compared to the height field representation (right).
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We present Tsugite — an interactive system for designing and fabricating wood joints for frame structures. To design and manually craft such joints is difficult and time consuming. Our system facilitates the creation of custom joints by a modeling interface combined with computer numerical control (CNC) fabrication. The design space is a 3D grid of...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... initializing the geometry as a 2D height field, the number of possibilities is greatly reduced, compared to the entire design space of a 3D cube of voxels. In the case of a 3 × 3 × 3 resolution joint between two timbers, the number of possible designs are reduced from about 134 million to about 260 000 ( Figure 11). For joints with a higher resolution or more intersecting timbers, the number of possibilities increase exponentially. ...
Citations
... The growth in digital fabrication access has signiicantly shaped HCI research. Motivated by the ethos of the Maker Movement and the opportunities of widespread and diverse fabrication technologies, HCI researchers have focused on developing easy-to-use digital fabrication design tools and fabrication techniques by simplifying digital design processes [39,52], enabling creators to reuse and remix existing 3D models [75,86,96], creating bridges between digital and physical representations [7,57,84], and automating the fabrication of complex assemblies such as mechanisms and joints [53,56]. Yet, despite the proliferation of digital fabrication equipment and extensive systems research aimed at novice-oriented digital fabrication tools, the actual impact of digital fabrication on design and production is unclear. ...
Understanding how professionals use digital fabrication in production workflows is critical for future research in digital fabrication technologies. We interviewed thirteen professionals who use digital fabrication for the low-volume manufacturing of commercial products. From these interviews, we describe the workflows used for nine products created with a variety of materials and manufacturing methods. We show how digital fabrication professionals use software development to support physical production, how they rely on multiple partial representations in development, how they develop manufacturing processes, and how machine control is its own design space. We build from these findings to argue that future digital fabrication systems should support the exploration of material and machine behavior alongside geometry, that simulation is insufficient for understanding the design space, and that material constraints and resource management are meaningful design dimensions to support. By observing how professionals learn, we suggest ways digital fabrication systems can scaffold the mastery of new fabrication techniques.
... In contrast, the width of the panels is defined by the dimensions of the 2.5-axis CNC machine. Larsson et al. [28] implement an interactive system for designing and fabricating wood joints for frame structures. The design space for the wood joints is a 3D grid of voxels that allows geometrical analysis and combinatorial search. ...
In the face of climate change, it is essential to rethink how we build to reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry. Timber construction can be a solution to reduce the use of concrete or steel, whose manufacture emits much CO 2. This paper proposes a method to reinterpret tenon and mortise joints for construction. Friction-based assemblies, particularly mortise and tenon wooden joints, have been studied for centuries in Asia and Europe and may offer promising constructive solutions, such as allowing disassembling rather than demolishing a structure. These assemblies can be complex; they initially required a great deal of craftsmanship , which robotics can now replace to manufacture and assemble them. Nevertheless, it is necessary to develop methods to produce these robotic joints. Our method uses non-sequential assemblies, which are by definition, opposed to sequential assemblies. An assembly is said to be sequential when the elements that compose it are assembled one after the other, in a defined order or not. For a non-sequential assembly, all the elements that compose it are in motion and assembled simultaneously. This assembly method has the particu-larity of being locked only by its kinematics, which makes it possible to easily (dis)assemble the elements by only knowing their motion. After an introduction and defining the terms and hypotheses of our research, we discuss the related word. In the fourth section, the developed method is explained. Then, we introduce the different parameters to control the assembly's design and kinematics. After that, we extend the previous method to the third dimension. Finally, a construction prototype demonstrates the method's efficiency.
... Li et al. [37] built a system that provided immediate engraving from drawings. Tian et al. [61] used a GUI and specialized CNC for improvisational carving of joinery, while Larsson et al. [34] provided a pipeline to explore and fabricate a large space of voxel-based joints. Follmer et al. [16] and Weichel et al. [67] used 2D/3D scanning and milling to prototype copy-and-paste interaction and bidirectional fabrication, respectively. ...
... Interlocking assemblies are defined by Song et al. in [5] as an assembly of rigid parts such that only one of them, the key, is movable while any other part or subset of parts are immobilised relative to one another. The literature on the subject is rich with, for instance, [6] who designed furniture joinery and study the stability of the structure, [4] who introduces a remarkable software to design wood joints with a special focus on fabricability, or [7] who build a framework aimed at generating novel assemblies and presents examples of voxelised puzzles. These approaches can be categorised in two families: they are cataloguebased, meaning that possible joints are predefined in some catalogue (or similarly that the user is supposed to already have some knowledge on the geometry of the joint) or voxel-based which limits the space of accessible shapes for a given voxel resolution. ...
... These approaches can be categorised in two families: they are cataloguebased, meaning that possible joints are predefined in some catalogue (or similarly that the user is supposed to already have some knowledge on the geometry of the joint) or voxel-based which limits the space of accessible shapes for a given voxel resolution. In these approaches, the final assembly can only be assembled along directions of translation defined in a pre-existing discrete set: a single sliding axis in [4], a set of 26 arbitrary directions in 3D (8 in 2D) for [6] or the three canonical directions of space as a result of the voxelisation in [7]. As such, existing methods greatly reduce design and motion freedoms and leave completely unaddressed the challenges of designing assemblies that can be built using rotational motions. ...
... A compelling study has recently been made by the authors of [4]: their approach is the exact complementary to ours in the sense that their work about the design of wood joints is both voxel-based and cataloguebased (but supports adaptation to non-orthogonal and non square joints by linearly deforming the grid of voxels) and primarily focuses on interaction with the human user, fabrication and mechanical relevance. ...
Despite being a notoriously difficult task, efficient design of interlocking assemblies could greatly impact the construction sector and reduce its environmental footprint by helping in the design of demountable buildings and the reuse of structural members. While a growing research effort in this direction is being undertaken by the computer graphics and structural engineering communities, most of the algorithms proposed so far imply restrictions on assembly directions or prior knowledge on the joint's geometry.While relevant, such tools do not fully explore the space of possible assemblies and often fail to produce surprising results. Moreover, these designs are always assembled through translational motions, and, to the best of our knowledge, very little research has been conducted to address the challenges of designing an assembly for rotation motions.
Building on recent advances in assembly design, this study investigates the automatic generation, using a Markov process and turtle graphics, of 2D interlocking sequential assemblies that can be assembled for any prescribed combination of translations and rotations. This generative approach shall be an aid to the engineer to explore the space of geometrical form-fitting connections and represents a first step towards an end-to-end workflow to design interlocking assemblies.
... Interlocking assemblies can be (dis)assembled at will and could potentially be used to design reusable structural members in buildings in close spirit to traditional Japanese architecture. Figure 2-A 3D sequential assembly (left, source: [6] ) and a traditional Nejiri Arigata joint (right, source: [7]). ...
... Inspiring the Next Generation 4 Finally a compelling study has recently been made by Larsson et al. [6]: their approach is the exact complementary to ours in the sense that their work about the design of wood joints is both voxel-based and catalogue-based (but supports adaptation to non-orthogonal and non-square joints by linearly deforming the grid of voxels) and primarily focuses on interaction with the human user, fabrication and mechanical relevance. ...
Despite being a notoriously difficult task, efficient design of interlocking assemblies could greatly impact the construction sector and reduce its environmental footprint by helping in the design of demountable buildings and the reuse of structural members. While a growing research effort in the direction of designing interlocking assemblies is being undertaken by the computer graphics and structural engineering communities, most of the algorithms proposed so far are either voxel-based [1] implying that the generated puzzle can only be assembled along orthogonal vectors-, or catalogue-based [2]-meaning that they assume prior knowledge on the geometry of the joint. Despite yielding relevant results, such tools do not fully explore the space of possible assemblies and often fail to produce surprising results. Moreover, these designs are always assembled through translational motions and, to the best of our knowledge, very little research has been conducted to address the challenges of designing an assembly for rotation motions. Building on recent advances in assembly design [3], this study investigates the automatic generation, using a formal grammar and turtle graphics, of 2D interlocking sequential assemblies that can be assembled for any prescribed combination of translations and rotations. The inputs of our tool are the design domain and the user-prescribed motions for disassembling. The output is a partition of the design domain into polygonal parts that forms a sequential assembly. In a post-processing step this output may be cleaned up in order to remove unnecessary geometrical features or optimised for as to improve a user-defined objective. 2 Figure 1-The top row is our tool's input: the disassembling motions are given by the location of a centre of rotation, a cone of translation and a single direction of translation. Bottom row: the fabricated raw output and an assembly sequence.
Timber joints had been applied as one of the primary methods across different cultures of building construction. The technique of crafting timber joints uses simple geometry to connect different components without the need of adhesives or fixings. Digitalisation and computational design method provided a new approach to developing complex timber joint connections. By combining this traditional technique with computational design methods, shape, and graph grammar opened new opportunities in reinterpreting timber joint designs. In this paper, we proposed a timber joints' synthetic dataset preparation using shape grammar and graph grammar for machine learning applications. The research focused on designing a prototype of a shape grammar extraction system and graph extraction system manually and using Topologic in Sverchok, Blender, with a discussion on how to shape grammar applications help to analysis and create a larger database for future machine learning development of this project.
