Computational Interlocking Furniture Assembly

摘要

Furniture typically consists of assemblies of elongated and planarrnparts that are connected together by glue, nails, hinges, screws, orrnother means that do not encourage disassembly and re-assembly.rnAn alternative approach is to use an interlocking mechanism, wherernthe component parts tightly interlock with one another. The challengernin designing such a network of interlocking joints is that localrnanalysis is insufficient to guarantee global interlocking, and therernis a huge number of joint combinations that require an enormousrnexploration effort to ensure global interlocking. In this paper, wernpresent a computational solution to support the design of a networkrnof interlocking joints that form a globally-interlocking furniture assembly.rnThe key idea is to break the furniture complex into anrnoverlapping set of small groups, where the parts in each group arernimmobilized by a local key, and adjacent groups are further lockedrnwith dependencies. The dependency among the groups saves therneffort of exploring the immobilization of every subset of parts inrnthe assembly, thus allowing the intensive interlocking computationrnto be localized within each small group. We demonstrate the effectivenessrnof our technique on many globally-interlocking furniturernassemblies of various shapes and complexity.