TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ion, Alexandra
A1  - Lindlbauer, David
A1  - Herholz, Philipp
A1  - Alexa, Marc
A1  - Baudisch, Patrick Markus
T1  - Understanding Metamaterial Mechanisms
JF  - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
N2  - In this paper, we establish the underlying foundations of mechanisms that are composed of cell structures-known as metamaterial mechanisms. Such metamaterial mechanisms were previously shown to implement complete mechanisms in the cell structure of a 3D printed material, without the need for assembly. However, their design is highly challenging. A mechanism consists of many cells that are interconnected and impose constraints on each other. This leads to unobvious and non-linear behavior of the mechanism, which impedes user design. In this work, we investigate the underlying topological constraints of such cell structures and their influence on the resulting mechanism. Based on these findings, we contribute a computational design tool that automatically creates a metamaterial mechanism from user-defined motion paths. This tool is only feasible because our novel abstract representation of the global constraints highly reduces the search space of possible cell arrangements.
KW  - Metamaterials
KW  - fabrication
KW  - computational design
Y1  - 2019
SN  - 978-1-4503-5970-2
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300877
PB  - Association for Computing Machinery
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Kovacs, Robert
A1  - Ion, Alexandra
A1  - Lopes, Pedro
A1  - Oesterreich, Tim
A1  - Filter, Johannes
A1  - Otto, Philip
A1  - Arndt, Tobias
A1  - Ring, Nico
A1  - Witte, Melvin
A1  - Synytsia, Anton
A1  - Baudisch, Patrick
T1  - TrussFormer
BT  - 3D Printing Large Kinetic Structures
T2  - The 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
N2  - We present TrussFormer, an integrated end-to-end system that allows users to 3D print large-scale kinetic structures, i.e., structures that involve motion and deal with dynamic forces.  TrussFormer  builds  on  TrussFab,  from  which  it inherits the ability to create static large-scale truss structures from 3D printed connectors and PET bottles. TrussFormer adds movement to these structures by placing linear actuators into them: either manually, wrapped in reusable components called assets, or by demonstrating the intended movement. TrussFormer  verifies  that  the  resulting  structure  is mechanically sound and will withstand the dynamic forces resulting  from  the  motion. To  fabricate  the  design, TrussFormer generates the underlying hinge system that can be printed on standard desktop 3D printers.  We demonstrate TrussFormer  with  several  example  objects,  including  a 6-legged walking robot and a 4m-tall animatronics dinosaur with 5 degrees of freedom.
KW  - fabrication
KW  - 3D printing
KW  - variable geometry truss
KW  - large-scale mechanism
Y1  - 2019
SN  - 978-1-4503-5971-9
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3311766
PB  - Association for Computing Machinery
CY  - New York
ER  -