Physics-Aware Design Tools for Digital Fabrication
Mélina Skouras, Postdoctoral Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wednesday, October 25, 1:00-2:00pm; Hariri Institute for Computing (111 Cummington Mall, Boston)
Abstract: Recent technological advances in digital manufacturing enable experts and casual users alike to design and fabricate complex structures with fine control over their external geometry and internal material distribution. However, designing an object that is truly functional by manually specifying its material composition and its external shape is extremely challenging. Indeed, the functionality of real objects is not determined by macro-scale shape alone. Stability, robustness, compliance, and other properties also depend directly on the material distribution of the object and largely affect its behavior in the physical world. Therefore, the designer needs to estimate and invert the effects of the physics on the object to obtain a structure that behaves as desired. In this talk, I will present novel algorithms based on physics-based simulation and inverse modeling that can be used to alleviate these difficulties and to allow the designer to easily create custom deformable objects. I will demonstrate these capabilities in the context of the design of objects as diverse as inflatable membranes, actuated characters and high-resolution functional objects. While some of the systems that I propose are fully automatic, others put the user in the loop and allow them to interactively explore alternative design solutions.
Bio: Mélina Skouras is a postdoctoral associate in the computational fabrication group led by Wojciech Matusik at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research lies at the intersection of computer graphics and digital fabrication and spans the areas of numerical simulation, geometric modeling, optimization and interactive design. She holds a PhD degree from ETH Zurich, where she worked in collaboration with Disney Research Zurich. Prior to coming to Switzerland, she was a software developer at Dassault systemes, in the CATIA Geometric Modeler team.