As a mechanical engineering student, I never anticipated that I'll find a SIGGRAPH paper so interesting!!! Now I'm binge watching all SIGGRAPH presentations on youtube lol. Somehow I got this vid recommended (pro'lly cuz I watch some robotics stuff at times) and I'm very glad.
How do you predict the way the wire is going to bend? The temperature is not going to be constant, because the part of the wire which is doing the cutting loses more heat, so the mechanical properties change along the wire. Furthermore you have to consider the force applied by the foam on the wire. I would be curious to know how you approached such a complex problem
this is BEAUTIFUL ,, imagine if the robotic hands could manipulate where they grip the wire for further settings , or even , "change" tools xD they could be like michael angelo
to be honest, What I can see is the future in tumor resection in optimizing area of resection ( like Glioblastoma Multiforme ). Many of the time, the tumor is difficult to resect due to margin involving functional area, and the margin is difficult to judge . In radiotherpay of cancer, gradient field optiziation is used currently. but curvature optizimation may still be a difficult topic in the RadioTherapy treatement
This would be really interesting to create hard-to-make curved formwork for concrete or plaster molds. With some kind of interior coating, i think itd be interesting to make reusable molds.
Adding one or two additional hands to rotate the table would be a great idea to remove cut parts. It would add also a great amount of futurism to tye design. Two arms cut, one or two holds the table and rotates it. Everything is moving.
and then someone STILL has to go back over it with a hot knife, because this method is no faster than, and far shittier than, just taking a hot knife to a block of foam.
Was it just for the challenge or is there a reason why this approach would be preferable over just using a single arm and a pointy hot-end to carve it in a more detailed manner?
I'm wondering if there's a similar effect for working on polystyrene foam using hot air & a bunch of differently sized nozzles. I'm a sculptor and have shaped the stuff many times using just a hot air gun & a small butane torch (& metal calipers for measurements). Note that the object isn't to bring the heat source into contact with the foam, but to bring it just close enough as to cause the material to soften & collapse in on itself. I've made several portrait heads in clay using fairly anatomically accurate human skull forms made of polystyrene as part of the internal support & armature.
Getting horrible future visions of bald business suit wearing industrial robots rolling around with superheated garrotes, lobbing human heads off in a blink of an eye with incredible precision.
I sometimes wonder why some smart people try to automate things artists usually make. Still trying to figure out how this would replace consumer foam products where economies of scale make molds far more effective than this. There might be a niche application in making a positive for some smaller molds for tool creation but even then you're looking at post processing either using a mill or an artist. Either way it'd be interesting to learn more about the algorithms than see more of this.
I find it interesting that despite the advanced technology, the traditional method of making a coarse "rough draft" followed by finer details is still used. The same applies to expert artists and scooters
Assuming hot wire can deal with high density foam, this process can be very beneficial for things like automotive prototypes. Custom car hulls are AFAIK often sculpted from foam and then covered with fiberglass for rigidity. This process looks absolutely amazing!
So sick. I'd love to have this to make fiberglass negatives for carbon layup without machining insulation foam and making a huge mess. Cut foam > fiberglass > Prepreg
Removing the cut-off material shouldn't be that hard either. While I get the generall idea behind "use a fan to blow it off", the drawback is a possible canting of the cut-off material with the remaining, so it won't be blown away. Two ideas come to my mind: 1) implement a vacuum-nozzle (no high suction force required because of the lightweight foam materials) on both robot arms that is attached e.g. on the opposite side of the hot-wire mounting points and use the nearer/better suited arm to pick out the cut off pieces. 2) Use a third arm with the method outlined above. Sounds more expensive, but might be easier to implement. Both methods would allow to either push the waste material away - or, if that is not possible, pull it out.
My guess is that they put together a series of cuts manually in the simulation, exported the arm movements from that and re-played it. So the angles were already known, possibly set arbitrarily by a human.
