MIT's Fabricaide Aims to Reduce Waste in Laser Cutting, Other Subtractive Manufacturing Approaches

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have published a paper, and the source code, for a system designed to reduce waste in laser cutting: Fabricaide.

Compared to other digital fabrication processes, laser cutters, die cutters, and similar machines have a low barrier to entry: designs can be created using simple 2D graphics software, many cutting materials can be readily obtained from local craft stores, and the fabrication process has fast turnaround times that allow for trial and error," the researchers explain in the introduction to their work. "However, laser cutters — and cutting machines as a whole — are not without their shortcomings.

"As a subtractive manufacturing process, they can produce significant amounts of leftover material which might never be used and go to waste. Given this, an important consideration users have is how to make the best use of the material sheets they have available. This is often tackled at the time of fabrication: For example, once users are finished with their digital design, they may try to arrange the parts so that it maximizes their space efficiency on the sheet. The task becomes particularly challenging when the sheets contain existing holes, which is a frequent occurrence in shared makerspaces and FabLabs."

The solution: Fabricaide, which handles the issue right at the point of design. "By giving feedback on the feasibility of a design as it’s being created," Development lead Ticha Sethapakdi explains, "Fabricaide allows users to better plan their designs in the context of available materials. A lot of these materials are very scarce resources, and so a problem that often comes up is that a designer doesn’t realize that they’ve run out of a material until after they’ve already cut the design. With Fabricaide, they’d be able to know earlier so that they can proactively determine how to best allocate materials."

Fabricaide, which is designed to be compatible with existing 2D and 3D CAD packages like AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and Adobe Illustrator, works by retaining an archive of user design actions — tracking how much of each material is left for the project, with multiple materials able to be assigned to specific sections of the design. Part placement is optimised to reduce waste, and if insufficient material is available suggestions offered for alternatives that are still in stock.

The full paper, to be published in the Proceedings of the ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, is available on the MIT website now; Fabricaide's source code, meanwhile, is available on GitHub under an unspecified license.