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David Bourne
Principal Systems Scientist

Associated center: CIMDS

Email address: db@ri.cmu.edu

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

For more information, see my personal homepage.

Jump to: Research interests | Keywords | Labs & groups | Projects | Publications

My research is focused on building intelligent systems for automated manufacturing. The ultimate goal is to design an artifact and send the design to an automated production facility that would produce it. I am currently investigating several research issues in the design area:

• Representing behavior in the design process: capturing the intended behavior of a part along with its geometry.
• The semantics of tolerance: developing a representation and treatment of tolerances in both design and manufacturing.
• Design for manufacturing and manufacturing feedback to design: building systems that provide feedback to engineering and design.

After a design is complete, it is passed to a production facility. Here, a setup and process plan is prepared along with descriptions of machine setups. The setup descriptions and the stock material are sent to the manufacturing workstations that automatically assemble the part into the fixtures. The manufacturing step is completed for that setup and for all subsequent setups, until the final part is correct and complete.

• Setup, fixture, sensing and process planning: research projects to plan all aspects of a particular manufacturing process.
• Sensor fusion: a research project to extract and combine information from many different sensors (e.g., acoustic emission, accelerometers, and vision) based on the task description.
• Real-time, distributed coordination: a research project to develop general methods for solving problems in a distributed environment, where each system has its own set of goals.
• Environment modeling: a research project to completely describe the work environment and to provide geometrical support services to other systems.

And finally, we are building the hardware environment that will sufficiently structure the environment to permit the automated production of one-off production quality parts.

This section last updated - January 1999.

manufacturing

• Rapid Manufacturing Lab - research investigating technologies and creating systems that achieve cost-effective small-batch manufacturing

• Bend Sequence Planner - Finds the best sequence of bending operations and repositionings of the part in the robot gripper to make a bent sheet metal part.
• BendCad Modeler - Sheet metal design system for the Intelligent Bending Workstation
• Fine Motion Planner - The fine-motion planner computes a sequence of robot moves to safely unload the workpiece from the bending machine.
• Grasping Planner - Sheet metal grasp planning for the Intelligent Bending Workstation.
• Motion Planner
• Product Decomposition - a method of decomposing sheet-metal products into a few, easily manufactured parts
• Stacking Planner - Generates plans for polyhedral sheet metal parts.
• Tooling Planner - Supports various decision making steps related to bending tools and press-brake setups.

• Interference-free polyhedral configurations for stacking
  V. Ayyadevara, D. Bourne, K. Shimada, and R.H. Sturges
  IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 18, No. 2, April, 2002, pp. 147 - 165. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [612 KB] copyrighted

• Determining Near Optimal Interference-free Polyhedral Configurations for Stacking
  V. Ayyadevara, D. Bourne, K. Shimada, and R.H. Sturges
  Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning, July, 1999, pp. 286-293. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [732 KB] copyrighted

• Automated Process Planning for Robotic Sheet Metal Bending Operations
  H.K. Kim, D. Bourne, S. Gupta, and S.S. Krishnan
  Journal of Manufacturing Systems, No. 5, September, 1998.
  Download: pdf [252 KB], ps.gz [107 KB] copyrighted

• Concurrent Decomposition for Sheet Metal Products
  C. Wang and D. Bourne
  September, 1997.

• Using Symmetry to Reduce Planning Complexity: A Case Study on Sheet Metal Production
  C. Wang and D. Bourne
  September, 1997.

• Design and Manufacturing of Sheet Metal Parts: Using Features and Their Constraints to Aid Process Planning and to Resolve Manufacturability Problems
  C. Wang and D. Bourne
  Robotics & Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1997, pp. 281 - 294. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [227 KB], ps.gz [235 KB], ps.z [300 KB] copyrighted

• Multi-part setup planning for sheet metal bending operations
  S. Gupta and D. Bourne
  ASME Computers in Engineering Conference, 1997.

• Automated Grasp Planning for Sheet Metal Bending
  H.K. Kim and D. Bourne
  International Sessions on Dynamics, Systems, and Design, November, 1996.

• Compact 2D Pattern Development from 3D Polygonal Surfaces
  C. Wang and D. Bourne
  1996.

• Cooperative Planning Sheet Metal Bending
  H.K. Kim, D. Bourne, and S. Gupta
  AIPS-96, 1996.