Portrait of Rapid Manufacturing Lab
Lab Head: David Bourne

Our research involves the design and implementation of flexible machines, mechanical hardware, electronics, control and software. The goal is customizing, which is now in great demand. The new machine tool industry will allow corporations to respond to the ever changing patterns of world trade. The new manufacturing systems can analyze new products and automatically will produce near optimal plans for production. Adaptability is the key.

The research comprises a series of projects implementing an Intelligent Bending Workstation:

  • Bend Sequence Planner
  • BendCad Modeler
  • Fine Motion Planner
  • Grasping Planner
  • Motion Planner
  • Stacking Planner

Site archive: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/imw/www/RML/

Displaying 6 Publications

Bend Sequence Planner

Finds the best sequence of bending operations and repositionings of the part in the robot gripper...

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...

Grasping Planner

Sheet metal grasp planning for the Intelligent Bending Workstation.

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.

Weld Sequence Planning

Many manufacturing processes require considerable setup time and offer a large potential for sched...