EAGER: Cybermanufacturing: Software/Hardware Combined Acceleration for 3-D Printing in Mass Customization

Abstract: Manufacturing and production have been big contributors to improved quality and sustainability of human life. Current market trends, such as consumer demand for variety, short product life cycles, high product quality and low cost, have resulted in the need for efficient, responsive, robust and sustainable manufacturing and production paradigm. 3D printing technologies hold the merit of affordability and customizability, while the key challenge in applying 3D printing for mass customization in real life is how to reduce the lead time per unit. The lead time of 3D printing a product unit comes from two sources, i.e., the pre-fabrication computation and manufacturing process. The pre-fabrication computation is increasingly significant and becomes the bottleneck in the manufacturing flow of mass customization in 3D Printing. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project looks to address this problem through new computational methods with potential for two orders of magnitude reduction in time for pre-facbrication computation. This project aims to develop a transformative computational paradigm of 3D printing in mass customization. The project will pursue two novel and complementary objectives: 1) design a suite of quality-guaranteed geometric algorithms for the scalable and time-efficient pre-fabrication computation framework.; and 2) develop a low-complexity and efficient computing system to facilitate and accelerate the use of these methods and algorithms in Objective1. This new computer system focuses on domain-specific computing platforms as the next disruptive technology for power-performance-runtime efficiency improvement. Specifically, the team will develop accelerator-based architectures for computing primitives of geometric algorithms. This new hardware architecture will exploit the parallelism and customization to improve the efficiency of the new computational paradigm in 3D printing with less delay, lower complexity and higher computing power.