Ergun Akleman on Construction of Large Shapes with Laser Cutting

3D-printing has become very popular now. There are many inexpensive printers available in the market. Maker spaces are built in many cities to design and print interesting shapes. Unfortunately, despite this hype, it still requires a significant amount of expertise to design and construct interesting shapes. Moreover, it is almost impossible to construct large shapes using 3D printers.

Laser cutting provides an alternative to construct large shapes. We simply cut planar shapes called panels. We can then bend and connect them to construct large physical shapes. Although, this process sounds easy, In current practice, architectural firms uses significant amount of technical expertise for the construction of interesting buildings such as Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.  Therefore, there is a strong need for the development of methods for practical and economical construction of physical structures that can be raised and formed in 3-space using minimal amount of planar panels.

Current construction methods, moreover, use isotropic materials such as thin metal that can provide forming any developable shape. On the other hand, not all materials are isotropic and there is now a strong interest in construction with anisotropic active materials that can change their shapes when they are activated [1]. These materials have now been applied to medical, aerospace, and automotive applications in the engineering realm. With the use of anisotropic materials, it will even be more important to use minimal amount of planar panels.

Recently, we have developed several multi-panel unfolding approaches to unfold any given polygonal mesh surface into a set of planar pieces [1, 2].  Our recent work provides efficient packing without even using simple rectangular packing algorithms since panels consist of a series of trapezoids that are closer to rectangles [2].  We have now developed a system to construct physical shapes that approximate original polygonal meshes by connecting and folding the planar pieces; we have constructed examples of physical shapes using planar pieces to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. Figure shows a Stanford Bunny structure constructed with our method. The construction took 12 hours to assemble for 4 people with approximately 600 planar panels. This demonstrates that it is possible to construct large shapes economically and easily. However, there is still need for significant amount of research and development to make these methods more practical.This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants NSF-EFRI-1240483, NSF-CMMI-1548243 and NSF-ECCS-1547075.

[1] Hernandez, Edwin Alexander Peraza, Shiyu Hu, Han Wei Kung, Darren Hartl, and Ergun Akleman. "Towards building smart self-folding structures."Computers & Graphics 37, no. 6 (2013): 730-742.
[2] Akleman, Ergun, Shenyao Ke, You Wu, Negar Kalantar, AliReza Borhani, and Jianer Chen. "Construction with physical version of quad-edge data structures." Computers & Graphics 58 (2016): 172-183.