Artificial Intelligence aided Design and Manufacturing

Course Overview

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Mechanical engineers and materials scientists constantly improve the manufacturing’s hardware and materials. With manufacturing going digital (e.g. 3D printers), there is an increasing need for computational algorithms/thinking. In this course you will learn how to effectively, and accurately predict and optimize the behavior of digitally manufactured objects. You will learn how to create content for a digital manufacturing system, manipulate the computational fabrication pipeline and translate the functional goals into input specifications.

Credit Points

6

Instructors

Dr. Vahid Babaei
TA: Sebastian Cucerca

Pre-registration

Please subscribe to this email list. Note that this is for us to keep you up to date (different from the official registration).

Classroom Location

MMCI Building (E1 7), Room 0.08

Lecture Time

Wednesdays 2 pm – 4 pm
There will also be three tutorials, which will be coordinated during the semester.

Office Hours

Mondays 3 – 4:30 pm, or by appointment (vbabaei@mpi-inf.mpg.de) at MMCI Building (E1 7), Room 1.16

Prerequisite

Some background in visual computing is recommended but not required.

Intended Learning Outcomes

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After successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Explain the fundamental mission of Computational Fabrication, why it is relevant and what is the necessary skill set for successfully applying it to real-world problems.
• Evaluate different representations of geometric models for manufacturing and create easily modifiable shapes.
• Review different manufacturing technologies, with a focus on additive manufacturing (3D printing), and analyze their advantages and disadvantages.
• Analyze the appearance reproduction workflow, including measuring, modeling and fabrication of object’s appearance.
• Apply halftoning algorithms to enable printers to approximate continuous inputs, thereby overcoming their inherent binary limitation.
• Understand necessary components for simulating the deformation of solid objects using the finite element method (FEM), including different measures of deformation, constitutive models of materials, and measuring mechanical properties of objects.

Course Components

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Nanoquiz

At the beginning of each lecture, we ask a few questions as a recapitulation of the last class.

Programming Assignment

The assignments give you the opportunity to apply what you have learned in class. It is also a chance for you to let us know about the topics that give you particular difficulty. There will be three programming assignments whose time and location will be decided by all during the semester. Assignments will be done individually in Matlab/C++. While they are not meant to test your programming skills, some exposure to these languages is recommended.

Project

You will have the opportunity to see your new learnings applied in a research context. You will start the projects (in groups of two or three) in the middle of the semester and you will present them during the last session and deliver a report.

Exam

There will be an oral exam on August 7 at 10 am in Room 0.01 of E1 7.

Grading Criteria

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• 10% Nanoquiz
• 20% Assignments
• 35% Project
• 35% Exam

Course References

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Unfortunately, there is no single textbook covering all materials of this course. We provide reading materials (mostly accessible online) at the end of each lecture.

Timeline

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