Kerf-Canceling Mechanisms: Making Laser-Cut Mechanisms Operate across Different Laser Cutters
Thijs Jan Roumen, Ingo Apel, Jotaro Shigeyama, Muhammad Abdullah, Patrick Baudisch
UIST’20: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Session: 5A: Fabrication: Joints and Mechanisms / Functional Assembly
Abstract
Getting laser-cut mechanisms, such as those in microscopes, robots, vehicles, etc., to work, requires all their components to be dimensioned precisely. This precision, however, tends to be lost when fabricating on a different laser cutter, as it is likely to remove more or less material (aka ‘kerf’). We address this with what we call kerf-canceling mechanisms. Kerf-canceling mechanisms replace laser-cut bearings, sliders, gear pairs, etc. Unlike their traditional counterparts, however, they keep working when manufactured on a different laser cutter and/or with different kerf. Kerf-canceling mechanisms achieve this by adding an additional wedge element per mechanism. We have created a software tool KerfCanceler that locates traditional mechanisms in cutting plans and replaces them with their kerf-canceling counterparts. We evaluated our tool by converting 17 models found online to kerf-invariant models; we evaluated kerf-canceling bearings by testing with kerf values ranging from 0mm and 0.5mm and find that they perform reliably independent of this kerf.
DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1145/3379337.3415895
WEB:: https://uist.acm.org/uist2020/
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