Selective Clay Milling for Interactive Prototyping

Prototyping plays an important role in industrial product designs. In this paper, for achieving a more intuitive and interactive prototyping, a selective clay milling center is introduced based on a synthesis of clay modeling, 3-Dimensional (3-D) scanning, robot machining and advanced geometric tools. In the system, the product shape design may start either from a physical hand-made clay model or a virtual Computer-Aided Design (CAD) model. Via 3-D scanning techniques, manual modifications of the clay model can be captured in the CAD form and in the meantime, geometric modifications of the CAD model can be fed back to the physical model by an efficient robot machining method, named selective clay milling. This design cycle is repeated until a satisfied prototype iterates. For a better control of the interactions between the manual modeling and robot milling, a 3-D scanning based calibration system has been developed in order to arbitrarily position the workpiece in the design process. With several experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed system is shown and the possible applications of the proposed system in industrial product design are described as well.